You can watch this Meme Lesson on Feedback on YouTube.

What happens if you force colleagues to become enemies every six months — by policy? 

Microsoft ran that experiment for a decade. It nearly cost them the company.

For most of Steve Ballmer's tenure as CEO, Microsoft ran a stack ranking evaluation system.

Every six months, every manager ranked their team on a forced curve. Fixed percentage on top. 

Fixed percentage at the bottom. 

Even if the whole team were stars. 

The curve could not be overridden. 

The curve was the feedback deity.

This is a system that forces colleagues to become enemies on a six-month cycle.

This is recency bias turned into HR policy.

This is a system that forces managers to spend days thinking about the ranking instead of the actual employees.

This was every DON'T in this lesson built into a single corporate system.

No specific behaviour evaluation.

Just a conversation about which bucket the person belongs in.

No year of observation, just two weeks of memory.

And the careers it ended were ended not through conversations but through a forced curve.

What Satya Nadella, Ballmer's successor, built in its place was the opposite of all of it. 

Forced curves eliminated.

Continuous feedback replaces biannual ranking.

Growth mindset replacing fixed judgment.

Learn-it-all, not know-it-all — a phrase Nadella has repeated in roughly every major communication since 2014.

The point was to evaluate behaviour — learning as opposed to end-state — knowledge.

The turnaround from roughly $300 billion in market cap to over three trillion had many causes.

Feedback culture was one of them.