Today's management-speak has a lot in common with 1930s Soviet propaganda—and it's making people miserable | Fortune

Abstraction: Modern corporate performance culture mirrors Soviet Stakhanovist ideology

Key points:

• In August 1935, Soviet miner Alexei Stakhanov extracted 102 tonnes of coal in a single shift — 1,400% above the 7-tonne norm — becoming a propaganda icon
• "Stakhanovism" promoted the ideal of the hyper-performing individual as key to the USSR's Second Five-Year Plan slogan "Personnel Decides Everything"
• Modern HRM language ("passion," "creativity," "potential," "endless possibilities") directly mirrors Stakhanovist rhetoric about the limitless individual
• Jack Welch's GE used forced distribution (stack ranking) of employees — top 20% / bottom 10% fired — echoing the Stakhanovist elite/reject structure
• Research over two decades shows performance management leaves employees with a permanent sense of inadequacy and erodes trust between workers
• 2013 death of London banking intern Moritz Erhardt (3 consecutive all-nighters) illustrates the human cost of neo-Stakhanovism

Connections: General Electric · Performance Management · Workplace Culture · Managerialism

Source: https://fortune.com/2023/03/30/corporate-workplace-culture-soviet-union-1930s-increased-production-performance/