this was posted in the blog. it is q n a from one of the bums.
even though BK agreed that managers gave SSL4 without thinking, he did not admit that layoff was done unfairly.
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Q: Do you expect managers to use SSL 4 as a performance management message?
A: So that’s a good one. I’ve gotten that question a lot. And I’m going to be completely transparent and open here. One of the most disappointing things I’ve gotten from this reduction was the number of people who have sent me notes, even managers who weren’t leaving, who have sent me notes who have said “gosh, I have just peanut buttered SSL 4 across my organization” and things like that. If you go back and read the guidelines and focal documents, it talks about that there are at least 2 measurements of your performance. There’s the rating, the outstanding, successful, BE, IR. And there are things like the stock. And even though the stock level has a fixed number attached to it, the relative rank of the stock is meant to separate the people within those ratings. There’s a difference between stock level 1 and 2 within an outstanding. The same is true for a successful who can have stock level 1-5. Successful with a stock level 4 is just barely above the curve. In general, if you get that, and what we tried to do this time, is it wasn’t that you got it one time. You have to get it more than once. You had to get it 2 out of the past 3 times. That is clearly a message that you aren’t improving, and you aren’t coming up that curve. So yes, I would tell you that in the future, that is very likely to be a point where we’ll draw the line. What we try to do though is to not cut too deeply. So if there are enough BE and IR we might stop it there but if not, then we will go up into stock level 4. I don’t think we’ll ever let it go above SSL4, but I’m not going to promise, but I can’t imagine a situation like that. You would almost be then talking about a general layoff. But SSL4 is not going to be an uncommon cutoff for these things. It’s in the documentation, it’s in our behaviors, and we’ve just let it slack over the last few years. In order for us to be competitive, we have to get back the discipline in that space as well.