"TJ" says, "... companies have not tried to put the value of their
people on the balance sheet for depreciation purposes which, IMHO,
proves that people cannot be viewed or even named resources."
No. That just proves there isn't an accounting convention to handle the
issue.
Good thing too. While people may be considered a resource - accounting
treatment or not - it does not follow that a "resource" needs to be
depreciated. There are other (living) examples of resources that
appreciate. (I'll leave it to the interested to discover some.)
One the problems with referring to people as resources is that they may
fall into the accountant/traditional management trap and become items in a
ledger/computer and lose not only their human nature but the possibility
of synergy.
What is being valued isn't "human beings" anyway. What is being valued is
knowledge, intelligence and wisdom. And most of the accounting/recording
registers that I've seen for this aren't very enlightening.
Has anyone ever hear of attempts to measure commitment, self-generated
energetic output or the like?
Michael McMaster : Michael@kbddean.demon.co.uk
book cafe site : http://www.vision-nest.com/BTBookCafe
Intelligence is the underlying organisational principle
of the universe. Heraclitus
--Michael McMaster <Michael@kbddean.demon.co.uk>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>