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Last month a 58-year-old engineer named Tuan Le sued General Motors after 27 years at the company.

And it was all because of a spreadsheet.

In 2024, GM rolled out a five-point rating system with quotas attached.

Every year, 5% of employees have to land in "Does Not Meet Expectations" and another 10% in "Partially Meets."

The system makes it so that if you've identified, say, 25 employees who "do not meet expectations," but the quota is 40, then you've got to find 15 more. It's more about quota than how a person is actually performing.

GM isn't alone these days; Meta's new "Checkpoint" system sorts everyone into 20% outstanding, 70% excellent, 7% needing improvement, 3% not meeting expectations, and ties bonuses to the bucket. It's followed in the footsteps of other tech giants like Amazon and X.

So it looks like the intense focus on performance is back, and I have a personal relationship with it, because the best talent system I ever sat inside looked a lot like these ones, from the outside.

But from the inside, there were some really key differences.

At The Motley Fool, once a year, we, the exec team, locked ourselves in a room for two days.

My CEO called it PVP: Performance vs. Potential.

Before the two-day PVP marathon began, we all had pre-work to do.

Each of us had to put every person who rolled up to our teams on a 2x2.

Performance, low or high. Potential, low or high.

Then, during the two days, we all shared our grids, and we had to explain and defend our grids to the seven peers who'd each worked with our people on something.

That last part, in my opinion, was the most critical piece.

Anyone can sit alone at their desk filling out a 2x2 grid. Most managers drift to generous. Some are overly critical. Many revert to the mean.

But saying "this person is high-high," out loud, in front of seven of your peers who can actively challenge you and ask for specific examples, welp, that's a much different act.

You find that you use that upper right quadrant more sparingly. Cause it meant something.

And, it cut the other way, too.

I got told more than once I was grading someone on the one thing they may have been sub-par at, while a peer had watched them do something else better than anyone else on my team. Sometimes the room was right, and sometimes I was.

We really only focused on the employees in three quadrants.

1. Upper right: this was where we spent most of our time. How can we give these people more scope, more money, more autonomy? Where can they be challenged more, incentivized more? This was easily the best part of the two days.

2. Upper left: these people were high potential but not performing well. What was in the way? Was it the wrong seat, wrong manager, wrong project? Most of the real coaching work I did at the Fool traces back to this quadrant.

3. Bottom left: after quickly verifying if this person had been given an honest shot, we handed over this list to HR to figure out the best path to parting ways. We were always generous with severance and dignity.

After two days you knew, without question, who the top 10% of the company was.

It wasn't the loudest people at an all-hands; it wasn't just based on recency bias or who you liked the most as a manager. It was the people multiple execs would independently fight to keep.

And you'd dealt with the bottom 20% or so, every year, on a regular schedule instead of just hoping for good intentions.

I don't know the ins and outs of GM's system or Meta's system, but what I think our PVP framework had that some of these companies do not have is the ability to hash it out in a room. And to iterate, tweak, and modify, independent of the quotas.

In the other systems, managers fill things out in a spreadsheet, hunt for bodies to fill the bottom x%, and ship it up to the big boss.

At the Fool, the percentages were an output. Nobody had to find a low-low. You just had to be honest in front of people who'd know if you weren't.

The thing I loved was that the accountability came from peers, not a statistical curve.

The Fool eventually moved to 360 reviews, which I've run as a CEO myself and believe to be really valuable, too. But past 150 or so people, I'd run both.

You can use the 360 to feed the grid, so the manager's rating reflects what peers and directs think, too, but then still get the leaders in the room once a year and make them say it out loud.

The value was never just the grid — it was the conversation around it.

First Round just launched a free program to find and train sales talent, and published one of the sessions in full. The argument: AI is eating the mechanics of sales (research, CRM, follow-ups) but not the human part, which is where deals are actually won or lost. This is a long, tactical blueprint on how to be insanely effective in GTM/sales, and worth the read.

Last month I finished the ex-Goldman CEO's memoir and it's a really great read. Fair warning: the middle wades deep into bond trading and securitized products, so if finance jargon makes your eyes glaze over, that stretch might lose you. But if you're even mildly financially fluent, this one's a fantastic autobiography that covers a fascinating era of finance.

Rob Henderson grew up poor and in foster care before Yale and Cambridge, and he makes the case that our worst moments rarely came when we were broke. They came right after payday. He gets there through Fitzgerald's "Babylon Revisited," and I absolutely love his last line: "Character isn't tested only by poverty and hardship, but equally, and perhaps even more dangerously, by success."

Here's a question I'd ask of you this week: if you had to stand in front of your peers tomorrow and name the top 10% of your company, could you do it without hesitating? And would the people in the room agree with you?

If the answer to either is no, that's your sign to figure it out.

Hit reply and tell me how you rank talent at your company. I read every one.

Thanks for reading,

Jordan