Chapter 9You can teach a pig to kiss, but it usually gets messy and pisses off the pig. Please, please, please fire the right people.

Is it fair? Is it nice? Is it pretty? Is it the Christian thing to do? Who cares! Get rid of people who are not performing and trade up. The biggest effect on the day-to-day mood of your company is your people: identify the people who can’t change, who are never going to change, or who don’t believe that change is necessary to be successful, and fire them.

I’m not the first to say this. Perhaps most famously, Jack Welch fired the bottom 10 percent of his managers every single year and had a reputation for brutal candor with the rest. You need to make something like this happen in your company, too—and to make sure ...

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