"The chart looks like colorful pop-art doughnuts flying through space.
The message, though, is anything but playful. Based on a mathematical
analysis of work at an undisclosed Internet company, each circle
represents an employee. Those who generate or pass along valuable
information within the company are portrayed as large and dark-colored.
And the others? "On a relative scale, they don't add a hell of a lot,"
says Elizabeth Charnock, chief executive of Cataphora, the Redwood City
(Calif.) company that carried out the study for a client. The upshot
for managers faced with a mandate to downsize: Small and pale circles
might be a good place to start cutting.
For most of its eight-year history, Cataphora has focused on digital
sleuthing. The company hunts for statistical signs of fraud. But in the
past few years, Cataphora has been dispatching its data miners into a
new market: statistical studies of employee performance."
BusinessWeek
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