I remember when I left my first job after a few years for a better opportunity and everyone was gracious and respectful. We’d talked about all the fun we’d had and everyone wished me luck. It was a real positive experience and it makes it easier to say positive things about the people of that organization.

In fact, the CIO said in some internal meetings that if anyone’s current position wasn’t the right spot for the employee and the employee wanted to do something different, he’d help them find something that would work. If it turned out that there wasn’t an opportunity within the organization and the person wanted to leave, he’d help them find something where the employee could be happy and successful.

I know a few people did leave (I ended up leaving a year later), but most everyone stayed and felt that the CIO cared about them and their career paths. I think the CIO’s kindness helped.

So what can we do? If these trends do exist, is there anything four individuals can do to reverse course in any meaningful way?

(P.S. I believe there is, so no fair answering “no”! But I am very interested in what ideas people can generate.)

Companies MUST act for their own benefit and should never complain when an individual does so as well. To say “the human need that should be given priority” is to mirror the concept of “need comes first.”

No, that will not work. Companies cannot look at the “human element” because to do so they would become unproductive and when they become unproductive, they fail.

One of the many problems people have with the capitalist system is they do not realize there is an inherent failure in any other methodology than the market value of goods and services.

You cannot arbitrarily set prices. If you want to set the price of say, bread, you would have to look at the costs involved. One cost would be the grain, which has as a component the labor of a farmer, which has as a component cost his food, including bread.

So any such attempt is circular.

If the market says a company must downsize or die, it must do so. It sounds cruel, but it is the only way the system can actually function.

When the cost of a good or service is arbitrarily set too low or too high, you have a problem. In fact, the fact that the government pushed for “more affordable home loans” is why we had the “real estate bubble.”

Yes, our current economic crisis was caused by someone trying to be too nice.

Why, exactly, would a company become unproductive if they consider the human element? There seem to be plenty of companies that do exactly that, and are very successful.

How is anything I wrote an argument for setting prices arbitrarily?

Why are the only two choices for a company in trouble to downside or die? Accepting only those two choices seems like a significant failure of imagination.