Not Ireland Specific, but still interesting

Not Ireland specific, but interesting. Paul Rellis of Microsoft it currently the President of IBEC.
 
Imagine you work at a company where every performance review, regardless of your personal performance, if you fall in the bottom 5% of employees you are either cut or do not receive a bonus. Now the bottom 5% doesn't seem so bad, right, you must be pretty terrible at your job to be in the bottom 5%. But in reality what happens is everyone becomes so concerned that they will end up in the bottom 5% they spend more time figuring out how to avoid doing so by playing office politics than by actually working to innovate. It doesn't seem particularly difficult to grasp why this might present some difficulties, especially in a company that is largely focused on innovation (with any level of innovation you are bound to have a couple of total flops before you figure out what works). If everyone is too scared to take risks for fear of being cut your going to create a culture that copies instead of innovates. What also happens is you create a culture where individuals are desperately looking for other jobs, instead of actually investing in the business.

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer
Above linked is an article highlighting the implications of this performance management system and ties this system to the decline of Microsoft as one of the major players in the technology sector. It takes a special kind of stupid to take a company that has a lions share of the market, with very few competitors (remember even 10 years ago if you owned a MAC you were considered a bit odd) to drive it to the point where everything it develops is just a sad attempt to copy something that Apple or Google or any number of other competitors has done better.