Measuring Human Capital: Converting Workplace Behavior into Dollars

Rating:
Summary: Terrific new work
Review: Every once in a while a book comes along that really impresses you and influence. Measuring Human Capital is just such a book. I really liked the science that the author brings to a warm and fuzzy area--measuring humans in the workplace. I never realized what can be done--imagine being able to use equations to see the exact dollar value of changing bureaucracy or having a more competent workforce. Even better yet the equations require only basic math to solve. Anyone can gather the data and easily do the calculations.

Most of the books that I have seen on human capital require that specialized studies be done to come up with any numbers. Or they apply only to evaluating training courses or other limited applications. Not Kravetz and this book. He shows you how you can set up metrics to be used for a determing the dollar value of many human capital issues--training, selection, management style, culture, just to name a few. And you can update the metrics every time you do a performance appraisal or an employee survey.

What I particularly like about this book are the case studies. They are from real corporations and are very easy to follow. At my company we are very rapidly moving ahead to apply the key metrics that are mentioned in this book. And we have managers from many disciplines (engineering, R&D, finance) who are using the metrics and loving it. They are saying only wonderful things about the metrics and the equations for calculating the dollar value of human performance. I never thought I would here these people say such words but they see how many dollars are at stake and are going for it.

The book is strong throughout, as I should have known from Kravetz' other writings. You can skip over some of the sections on developing the metrics if you just want to use the equations, however I would recommend reading this material because all users should be familiar with it. As the author points out, you have to develop the metrics only once but they must be done in a certain way to calculate the dollar value of human performance. You need to read these chapters to understand how to set up the metrics.

Kravetz is right--there is a gold mine underneath the board room table that senior managers are not using. If only we could get all managers to read this book and implement. They would see that there are millions of dollars to be made from better people management activities. This is a great book that is destined to be read and used by many people.

Rating:
Summary: Terrific new work
Review: Every once in a while a book comes along that really impresses you and influence. Measuring Human Capital is just such a book. I really liked the science that the author brings to a warm and fuzzy area--measuring humans in the workplace. I never realized what can be done--imagine being able to use equations to see the exact dollar value of changing bureaucracy or having a more competent workforce. Even better yet the equations require only basic math to solve. Anyone can gather the data and easily do the calculations.

Most of the books that I have seen on human capital require that specialized studies be done to come up with any numbers. Or they apply only to evaluating training courses or other limited applications. Not Kravetz and this book. He shows you how you can set up metrics to be used for a determing the dollar value of many human capital issues--training, selection, management style, culture, just to name a few. And you can update the metrics every time you do a performance appraisal or an employee survey.

What I particularly like about this book are the case studies. They are from real corporations and are very easy to follow. At my company we are very rapidly moving ahead to apply the key metrics that are mentioned in this book. And we have managers from many disciplines (engineering, R&D, finance) who are using the metrics and loving it. They are saying only wonderful things about the metrics and the equations for calculating the dollar value of human performance. I never thought I would here these people say such words but they see how many dollars are at stake and are going for it.

The book is strong throughout, as I should have known from Kravetz' other writings. You can skip over some of the sections on developing the metrics if you just want to use the equations, however I would recommend reading this material because all users should be familiar with it. As the author points out, you have to develop the metrics only once but they must be done in a certain way to calculate the dollar value of human performance. You need to read these chapters to understand how to set up the metrics.

Kravetz is right--there is a gold mine underneath the board room table that senior managers are not using. If only we could get all managers to read this book and implement. They would see that there are millions of dollars to be made from better people management activities. This is a great book that is destined to be read and used by many people.