“No more curve,” said Lisa Brummel, Microsoft’s EVP of HR last week, curtly dismissing Microsoft’s much-derided but iconic practice of ranking each team member on a forced distribution. This was big news, the lead of many a business section. After all, this practice of “stack ranking,” of being forced to rate every single one of your team on a bell curve from excellent to poor (even if the whole team had, in fact, performed excellently) has been singled out by everyone from HBR to Vanity Fair as one of the reasons for Microsoft’s inability to foster high-performing teams, a major cause of its “lost decade.”