Human Capital and Radical Centrism Type in "Human Capital" for a Google search and you will get approximately 14 million hits. Following are just three short excerpts on the subject. Indeed, there are journals, consulting firms, college courses, and much more, all devoted to human capital. Essentially, Human Capital is the most important part of any enterprise, whether a business, a voluntary organization, a religion, a political party, the military, or anything else. Let us focus on sports and human capital. Consider how baseball employs, in effect, talent scouts, who evaluate prospects for major league teams. All baseball teams depend heavily on identifying talent and offering attractive contracts to the best available players ; that is how pennants are won, and is the only thing like a guarantee of long term success. Players are the team's human capital ; the sport is human capital dependent. This principle applies to all other sports, of course. Investment is crucial in the process. If you don't invest in something, whatever might be available, it might have nothing at all to do with money, it could be time or skills or contacts, etc, you don't value that something. This is absolutely obvious and an unarguable principle. But with first rate talent what investment doesn't pay off ? Think of the 1984 basketball draft. The Portland Trailblazers picked Sam Bowie, who was the overall # 2 pick. Anyone remember him ? Anyone at all ? Actually he was fairly good, but when all was said............ Number #1 was Hakeem Olajuwon who, of course, went on to have a stellar NBA career. The number #3 pick went to the Chicago Bulls, a little-heralded player from UNC named Michael Jordan, who, needless to say, became the greatest player in the history of the sport. Someone scouted Jordan and told management that he was a real talent, well worth the Bulls' first selection that year. Someone owes that scout several million dollars more then he was paid. Meanwhile, to take an opposite example, the Chicago Cubs once employed a second baseman named Lou Brock. He had been with the team just a couple of seasons but was showing a lot of potential. Still, the Cubs needed a pitcher and traded Brock to the Cardinals for a pitcher named Phillips who, in not too long, threw out his arm and was finished. Brock, of course, went on to become one of the all time greats at his position and the champion base stealer in the history of baseball. It is fair to say that whomever in the Cubs organization let that deal go forward was a class # 1 screw-up. He obviously was someone who was "sure" that he had made the right decision, who used his insider knowledge to make the "best deal" possible for the Cubs, someone who, at the time, surely congratulated himself for his keen judgement. And , who can say ? Maybe until then he had made a number of really smart decisions. But that was a decision that just about made all of those good decisions completely moot. For that matter, the Bulls also blundered when they let Phil Jackson walk, clearly the best active coach in the NBA at the time. After that, with Jordan gone, and the other star players departed along with Jackson, the Bulls languished as a second rate team for the next decade. Just who let Jackson go ? I can't tell you, but whomever he was, and however smart he might have been before that, from that moment onward he deserved a reputation as a first class basketball loser. Such is the story of human capital in high level professional sports. Well, not quite. Anyone remember the "over the hill gang" Washington Redskins teams of 1971 - 1977 ? That team was coached by George Allen, someone who believed in proven talent. And in his case this was important, the Skins had been also-rans for many years by that time and the pressure was on to see results. Allen delivered. While he did not win any Super Bowls he did win NFC championships in every year except the last in his tenure, and even that final team had a 9 -5 record. Allen's secret ? Trade for the best available veteran players, not youth. Because Allen knew he could depend on seasoned players to perform at the highest possible level, they had the know-how, the smarts that only come from experience, and utter determination. Well, OK, some of that is also available from new players, but Allen's point is that it is far less of a gamble, in fact not a gamble at all, to go with proven professionals. In effect, Allen was his own best scout, he knew exactly what skills his players had and was then in a position to make the very best use of them in football. Allen also understood human capital -very well, in fact. The point of all this is that Radical Centrism which does not cultivate human capital is rather lame RC, and not worth very much. My philosophy is that when you identify really good human capital, dammit, make the most of it. We did, for a while, have a fresh new face in our group, Mike, someone with all the potential in the world. Unfortunately he vanished from the scene, but the point is that doing whatever possible to encourage a talent like Mike is / was the best possible thing to do. And it sure in heck was not my idea that he disappeared; I did my best to keep him on board. OK, time to start that process again. I remember one year that I worked as a graphic artist at Northern Arizona University. The previous year I also worked there, I think this was 1993, but in the meantime NAU decided to revamp its food services and so forth, and needed all new graphic art, so they hired an additional graphic artist. What a great time that was, each of us provoking the best work on the part of the other, in friendly competition, month after month. This is also a good object lesson for RC, the need for spirited dialogue about Radical Centrism and its considerable potential. But there is no such thing as dialogue-for-one. RC, in my humble opinion, is far and away the best of all political philosophies and could remake American politics from top to bottom. But if this concept simply does not register, if it does not penetrate people's minds, it really is time to try another approach. Or some kind of major change. I never have been a business manager ; it is anything but my strength. But RC without resources is a joke. It is doomed to irrelevance when there is effectively zero capital behind it. Someone could be the best airplane pilot in the world but with no airplane to fly the outcome is absolutely nothing. A pilot among people with no interest in airplanes hardly makes good sense, does it ? Well, there are friendships to think about and to treasure. That is plenty of reason to stay on, at least with some input. But RC.org is going nowhere and I am way too ambitious to accept that kind of situation indefinitely. No-one should accept a situation of any kind where achievement for a common cause has no value to anyone. If there is something else to think, what might that be? Billy ================================= Human Capital by Gary S. Becker
To most people, capital means a bank account, a hundred shares of IBM stock, assembly lines, or steel plants in the Chicago area. These are all forms of capital in the sense that they are assets that yield income and other useful outputs over long periods of time. But such tangible forms of capital are not the only type of capital. Schooling, a computer training course, expenditures on medical care, and lectures on the virtues of punctuality and honesty are also capital. That is because they raise earnings, improve health, or add to a person’s good habits over much of his lifetime. Therefore, economists regard expenditures on _education_ (http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Education.html) , training, medical care, and so on as investments in human capital. They are called human capital because people cannot be separated from their knowledge, skills, health, or values in the way they can be separated from their financial and physical assets........ New technological advances clearly are of little value to countries that have very few skilled workers who know how to use them. _Economic growth_ (http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/EconomicGrowth.html) closely depends on the synergies between new knowledge and human capital, which is why large increases in education and training have accompanied major advances in technological knowledge in all countries that have achieved significant economic growth........ The outstanding economic records of Japan, Taiwan, and other Asian economies in recent decades dramatically illustrate the importance of human capital to growth. Lacking _natural resources_ (http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/NaturalResources.html) —they import almost all their _energy_ (http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Energy.html) , for example—and facing _discrimination_ (http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Discrimination.html) against their exports by the West, these so-called Asian tigers grew rapidly by relying on a well-trained, educated, hardworking, and conscientious labor force that makes excellent use of modern technologies. China, for example, is progressing rapidly by mainly relying on its abundant, hardworking, and ambitious _population_ (http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Population.html) . ----------------------------------------------------------------- Journal of Human Capital is dedicated to human capital and its expanding economic and social roles in the knowledge economy. Developed in response to the central role human capital plays in determining the production, allocation, and distribution of economic resources and in supporting long-term economic growth, JHC is a forum for theoretical and empirical work on human capital—broadly defined to include education, health, entrepreneurship, and intellectual and social capital—and related public policy analyses. ------------------------------------------------- _smarter companies blog_ (http://www.i-capitaladvisors.com/) The Central Importance of Human Capital June 17, 2010 by _Mary Adams_ (http://www.i-capitaladvisors.com/author/mary-adams/) Knowledge in an organization begins and ends with people. The knowledge and experience that employees bring to their work is probably the greatest driver of an organization’s success. What employees know helps to build an organization as well as to preserve, maintain and improve it. This importance is generally accepted. It is rare to meet a CEO who won’t tell you that his or her organization has the “best people” in the market. But this kind of statement is rarely challenged. Most businesspeople still don’t know how to see beyond the people and understand the employees and managers of an organization as knowledge assets—as human capital. There are some that are critical of the label “human capital.” To them, it seems to smack of an attitude that people are just nameless cogs in an organization, exploited for their knowledge and experience. We don’t share that view. In fact, we like the term human capital because it is a graphic statement of the fact that people are indeed an asset of the organization. Assets require investment and maintenance. And they are a critical part of the productive capacity of the organization. To us, this is the realization that matters—that your people are part of your productive capacity, now more so than ever. Because the future of your company depends on what you know rather than what you own. And what you know as an organization is intimately tied to the knowledge and experience of the people in your organization..... -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
