Word.ws English Dictionary

rank and yank

rank and yank noun: a model of employee productivity in which workers are ranked into the top 20 percent, the adequate 70 percent, and the bottom 10 percent, and those in the bottom group are fired.

Noun

rank and yank (uncountable)

  1. (informal) A model of employee productivity in which workers are ranked into the top 20 percent, the adequate 70 percent, and the bottom 10 percent, and those in the bottom group are fired.
    • Stack ranking had come into fashion after GE CEO Jack Welch used a similar system, called rank-and-yank, to turn around that company in the 1980s and 1990s.2015 January 2, Nicholas Carlson, “The Day Marissa Mayer's Honeymoon At Yahoo Ended”, in Business Insider, archived from the original on 24 Sep 2022

Questions about rank and yank

What does rank and yank mean?
Rank and yank means a model of employee productivity in which workers are ranked into the top 20 percent, the adequate 70 percent, and the bottom 10 percent, and those in the bottom group are fired.
What part of speech is rank and yank?
Rank and yank is a noun.

Words near rank and yank in the dictionary

  1. ranjaus
  2. ranjow
  3. ranjows
  4. rank
  5. rank and file
  6. rank and yank
  7. rank badge
  8. rank badges
  9. rank of apparition
  10. rank outsider
  11. rank outsiders

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rank and yank (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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