Not really, because it really is a case of continuous improvement. As you objectively assess people, as you counsel out the ones that don't belong (or re-task them to a place where they will perform better), manage up the folks in the middle to make them more effective, and as you reward your top performers, the whole organization continually moves up.

And he was right. And that's a problem when it comes time to review an employee's performance. If you don't have anything objective to show an employee, that employee will dismiss any criticisms you have, chalking it up to you not liking them. They certainly won't blame their behavior or performance. You really have to have something objective to show them, something that you can measure, in order to get buy-in from them.

Through business processes. So the first thing you have to do is understand how your employees perform certain tasks, then systematize them to make them reliable, and finally, train your employees to that standard so that everybody is doing each task the same way. In the process of doing that, you'll be able to start identifying what you can measure; what the objective output of those different business processes is. Once those two pieces are in place, you have an objective way of to measure people's performance that is consistent across everybody who shares that same responsibility, allowing you to identify who your outstanding performers are, who the folks are who are making a contribution but plodding along, and who are your weakest performers. Once all this is in place, you can start thinking about implementing something like 20-70-10.

Probably the best example that gets talked about is McDonalds. Regardless of whether or not you like their food, the fact is that, through their Hamburger University, they teach all of their employees how to make a McDonalds' hamburger so that if you go to a franchise anywhere in the world and order a Big Mac, it will taste the same. Why? Because they've taught every single employee how to make burgers in a very reliable and consistent fashion. That method has become a model that a lot of businesses have adopted since McDonalds burst on the scene 40+ years ago.

To be honest, implementing 20-70-10 is not an easy task. It requires a lot of preparation and planning to get it done effectively. On the preparation side, the key to managing anything is understanding, at a very specific level, what it is you're doing. So before you can even think about implementing something like 20-70-10, you have to first identify what your business processes are. You have to get a clear understanding of how your employees do what they do at a very specific, task level so that you can have different people within the same organization, with the same responsibilities, perform those responsibilities in a consistent fashion.