Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment

by Jason Schreier

One policy she introduced, called stack ranking, asked managers to give ratings to each of their employees across a five-grade scale: Top, High, Successful, Developing, or Low. Each of those categories had a quota, and managers were expected to place around 5 percent of their teams in the bottom two—a controversial policy that tech giants like Microsoft had once enacted to cull their lowest performers. At Blizzard, getting a low ranking was like being marked with a permanent scar: Developing employees would be passed over for promotions, denied raises, and would even receive lower portions of the profit-sharing bonus pool every year.