NOD should be by default in every big company
Its actually a really brutal method of downsizing without paying redundancy money. Be careful what you wish for.
In Australia many years ago -- early to mid 1990's -- we had a spate of large public organisations being privatised, with a predictably large number of HR casualties. There was typically a brief queueing system, as some token effort at redeployment was considered ... but in reality once you'd been side-moted to a Window Gazer role, you know precisely where you stood.
The phrase used locally was 'being led into / sitting around in Flight Deck' -- that being the name of the frequent flyer awards club of one of our two major airlines at the time. (That airline's completely gone now -- make of that what you will.)
On top of this a lot of dead wood is not dead wood in a different environment - it might be better all round to let people move on to new opportunities.
No it isn't. You should be firing people who don't pull their weight and everyone should know about it.
It is great to build a culture where you never need to fire anyone because you are good enough at hiring, and at placing, moving, and counseling (a two-way process!) those you have hired to be able to effectively utilize them. And, if you've done that, then its good to actually not fire anyone.
But, outside of that, I don't see the value of a culture where nobody is fired; especially if it achieved through internal segregation where it cannot avoid being visible to people within the organization that the "not firing" is largely a charade.