I suspect the culture that led to cutting 10% of low performers was part of why manufacturing went to the Japanese. It is known for example that part of why DRAM was beaten by the Japanese in the 1980s was cooperation instead of competition.
Since whoever comes out on the bottom of the evaluation list will be fired, for instance, employees are incentivized to sabotage each others' work to make sure that it's someone else left without a chair when the music stops; and managers are incentivized to deliberately hire underqualified people to fill open positions, so they can protect their good workers by having a designated loser to throw to the wolves when evaluation time comes.
S/he is nothing but a drag on the team, on the papers, but in reality s/he might be the brains of the operations, with a "high-performer" as company front.
Abstract that away and you can see HR gunning out everyone but sales. Sales can do nothing without a good product, except sell themselves extremely well.
My personal base assumption is that HR, with the 10 % rule without external oversight destroys more valua then it creates. The powerplays alone are enough to wreak havoc.