Editing Vitality curve (section)

===Amazon===
Excerpt from ''[[The New York Times]]''<ref name="Kantor">{{cite news | last = Kantor | first = Jodi|author2=Streitfeld, David |
 title = Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace | newspaper = [[The New York Times]] | date = August 15, 2015 | url = https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html | access-date = 2015-08-17 }}</ref>
<blockquote>
Amazon holds a yearly Organization Level Review, where managers debate subordinates' rankings, assigning and reassigning names to boxes in a matrix projected on the wall. In recent years, other large companies, including Microsoft, General Electric and Accenture Consulting, have dropped the practice — often called stack ranking, or "rank and yank" — in part because it can force managers to get rid of valuable talent just to meet quotas.

The review meeting starts with a discussion of the lower-level employees, whose performance is debated in front of higher-level managers. As the hours pass, successive rounds of managers leave the room, knowing that those who remain will determine their fates.

Preparing is like getting ready for a court case, many supervisors say: To avoid losing good members of their teams — which could spell doom — they must come armed with paper trails to defend the wrongfully accused and incriminate members of competing groups. Or they adopt a strategy of choosing sacrificial lambs to protect more essential players. "You learn how to diplomatically throw people under the bus", said a marketer who spent six years in the retail division. "It's a horrible feeling."
[...]

Many women at Amazon attribute its gender gap — unlike Facebook, Google, or Walmart, it does not currently have a single woman on its top leadership team — to its competition-and-elimination system. 
[...]

The employees who stream from the Amazon exits are highly desirable because of their work ethic, local recruiters say. In recent years, companies like Facebook have opened large Seattle offices, and they benefit from the Amazon outflow.

Recruiters, though, also say that other businesses are sometimes cautious about bringing in Amazon workers, because they have been trained to be so combative. The derisive local nickname for Amazon employees is "Amholes" — pugnacious and work-obsessed.<ref name="Kantor"/>
</blockquote>