By that logic productivity in all industries could be improved by introducing flogging / periodic executions of lowest performing staff.

What's more likely: someone takes a risk knowing that if they fail their kids won't be homeless, or knowing that if they fail, they will be?

You are right -- that's how we built the Pyramids and America pre civil war, and look how far that got us.

If you want interpret my response at the extremes I'm more that glad to dance.

The pyramids were built with corvee labor as a tax scheme and antebellum America relied on slavery, even the industrial free states utilized cheap raw materials like cotton produced in slave states.

Are you suggesting that compelling people to work by force is an appropriate modern economic system?

It's just as appropriate as 'flogging / periodic executions of lowest performing staff'

Hence my point.

Some companies do this to a lesser degree -- every year they fire the bottom 10% of performers -- also known as stacked ranking.

Good for making people re-read their Rand, but pretty terrible for maintaining stable systems. What if you fired the bottom 10% of law-abiding citizens, as in 'if you speed and get parking tickets and DUIs and beat your husband or wife, you get fired'? To what extent is 'made more money immediately for the company' a useful societal metric? Why do we benefit just because THAT company happened to make money? And yet that's the metric… better we should ask 'what did they do'. Money is essentially a meaningless metric.

If enough people decided 'the best people are those who bite other peoples' fingers off and keep them in a jar', that would be where the money was, and you'd be firing people who don't have human blood on their lips. There's no correlation between 'earning more money' and anything useful, societally or personally.

I think most firms that tried it have since scrapped it. It turns out to be about as effective as firing a random 10% and promoting another random 10% of staff.

Consider: a project is floundering. You put your best engineers on it to try and save it. It fails anyway. They get fired! Yay stack ranking.

I don't know what the NPR piece was about, but you're right... when I _don't_ have a fallback is absolutely when I work the absolute hardest.... but not at my job. When I don't have a fallback, I'm doing the absolute minimum at my job, and working extra hours around the clock studying to line up a fallback. When I think I have a fallback, or things are going really well at my job is the only time where I'm fully dedicated to my employer