Internal costs of a reorg

All companies need to re-organize internally, it is a logical part of growing and changing; I am a strong believer that life IS change, and what we can't prevent we must embrace. Change is the world's only constant; its opposite isn't stability... rather immobility, or death.

That being now out of the way, every change come with a price tag, and we have to carefully evaluate if the cost is something we want to pay now, if it is better postponed, and how it should be prepared for, communicated and managed.

Global cost (or value) of a human being

[This post is a continuation of my previous post "Social accountability in Human Capital Management", posted on March 18th. You may want to read them in sequence]

When considering skilled labor a resource, I came up wondering – what is the cost of a resource? Is it simply, in this case, the salary? Or is it actually the cost of the employee providing the service? In other words, can we separate the individual from the service provided?

Typing “Cost of Human Being” in a Google Search Engine generates about 259’000’000 results in under 30 seconds. Most of these results are highly controversial, and bring in ethic debate about cost versus value, genetic research, buying human beings and ultimately, slavery.

There is only some marginal (and humoristic) information about the actual COST of raising an individual in nowadays society: after all, creating a baby is one of the (few) free acts in our modern world, but raising the same is anything but free. It has been calculated that the cost of bringing up a child in the US is close to 300’000 US, not including college (college tuition alone accounts to an average of 160’000 US for an average 4 years degree, College Board, 2011-2012 [4]).