Replying to LO24315 --
At de Lange asks, "Why employ a person?" He also explains why: "because
the answer is not so obvious to me any more."
At also indicated he visited some economics textbooks and found no novel
answers there. One reason for that might be that the classical economists
have no room for entrepreneurs or entrepreneurship. Novelty doesn't fit
the economists' world view (although I'm finding Ludvig von Mises' book,
"Human Action," quite interesting).
I also don't think there is a pat answer to At's question. Ask one person
and you'll get one answer, ask another and you'll get another. So, I
won't try to answer definitively, but I will answer from my perspective.
I hire people because I want others around me who will care for the same
enterprise I care about.
I hire people because I want others around for whom I can care and who
will care for me in return. In other words, I hire people because I want
human relationships at work as well as before or after working hours.
(Larry Wilson, former head of Wilson Learning is credited with saying
something like this: "You can love your company until you're blue in the
face but it will never love you back.")
I hire people because I want more than one brain involved -- and that
means more than one world view, more than one set of mental models, more
than one set of mental skills, more than one set of values, more than one
set of features, more than one set of manual skills, more than one just
about everything. In short, I hire people because I want the constructive
conflict of diverse ways of seeing, feeling, talking, sensing and so on.
I hire people because giving people meaningful work at respectable levels
of compensation is one of the most beneficial things one person can do for
other people and for society. (And deliberately putting them out of work
is one of the most despicable.)
I hire people because I don't want to be alone in my endeavors.
I hire people because, as implied above, we can get a whole lot more done
than I can get done by myself.
How's that for a starter set, At?
--Fred Nickols The Distance Consulting Company "Assistance at A Distance" http://home.att.net/~nickols/distance.htm nickols@worldnet.att.net (609) 490-0095
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