Editor's Note: Making the Cut

In his recently released book, Jack, the retiring CEO of GE, Jack Welch, describes the lengths to which GE managers have gone to not identify the bottom 10 percent of the people on their teams. One business unit, he explains, even put a dead man on its "bottom 10" roster. Using what it calls "the vitality curve," GE demands that its managers identify people in their organization whom they consider to be in the top 20 percent, the middle 70 percent, and, of course, the bottom 10 percent — where GE's axe annually falls. Welch writes: "You'll miss a few stars and a few late bloomers — but your chances of building an all-star team are improved dramatically."

This is a point members of the consulting profession may find a bit obvious, having long fancied themselves as industry's meatball surgeons — a stoic clan endowed with the hardened sensibilities client companies depend on when heads need to tumble. But as the profession continues to assess it own surgery needs, its true character — stoic and otherwise — is being revealed.

As any client company can quickly attest, it's easier for a manager to identify the weakest players when he or she has no emotional attachment to the team. And so it goes inside consulting firms. But what is common logic among clients is too frequently ignored by consultants, who, fortified by their own celebrated "head-chopping" experiences, unwittingly become blind to their professional dispositions and attachments. Add to that a client-facing bias — one that routinely places "inside managers" three levels below client managers within the profession's caste system — and it becomes pretty clear that consulting firms may want to keep all serrated objects out of reach. Or, at least until the firm can formulate a more thoughtful approach to a layoff.

In this issue, our cover story, "Making the Cut," takes a look at the painful but all-so-necessary workforce reductions currently underway within the consulting sector. While some may argue that such head-chopping would have been avoidable had the profession been more savvy from the outset with its own talent management strategies, the economy's swift downturn has left certain firms little choice in the matter. Be that as it may, the task at hand for many consultancies is to correctly distinguish the firm's performers, while at the same time rooting out the nonperformers.

Of course, knowing this doesn't make the manager's task of identifying the "bottom 10" any easier.

Jack Sweeney, Editor-in-Chief

(customercare@alm.com)