It is common knowledge managers routinely protect under-performing employees AND it is NOT at their expense. They protect the losers because they are the ones who have to ck ss to keep a job since they can't keep one on their talent, skills and competence because they have none. The competent, on the other hand, are not interested in playing politics or feeding some irrelevant, useless, narcissistic, overpaid manager's ego but obviously this will get you laid off or PIPed out the door on a bunch of bogus allegations or skewed metrics (and you better believe the worthless metrics are manipulated because I saw it and was asked to change things by regional/divisional directors) but hey, collusion is "cool" and everyone's doing it! And, those stacked rankings? Soooo 80's and soooo bogus. Absolutely the ONLY reason to use them is to stack the deck towards the ss kissers who usually are the manager's little **es and only too happy to do the dirty work and always at the manager's disposal to blatantly lie at other employees' expense and always eager to lie in order to cover the manager's ss -- that's how to ensure you come out on top in that scientifically accurate stacked ranking so it also means job stability and sometimes it even means a big fat promotion for a job that doesn't exist until it was secretly created as a reward for lying!! Happens all the time... So, if you really are an EX manager, you have only proven what everyone else already knows: managers are so entrenched in the phony, fake, insidious, dirtbag culture they have created they actually become delusional and believe the BS they spew but what they will never believe is that it is common knowledge that everyone knows what is going on and knows this sleazy culture has existed, at least at EMC anyway, for the last 10 years or so. Ummm, and that, boys and girls, is why EMC is now called DELL. And, then the greedy, dirty managers were all that was left so they turned to cannibalism and ate each other up and nobody cared. The end.