HUMAN CAPITAL ANALYTICS: THE LEADING EDGE OF MEASUREMENT 173
revealing generalizable paths to financial performance. I am
hard-pressed to remember any that has ever been proven to
work beyond chance over the long term.
One of the more blatant ruses I’ve seen is to recommend a
set of mixed, arbitrary, often overlapping, subjective issues,
while simultaneously ignoring quantitative performance re-
cords, and then promise to draw correlations with the cre-
ation of shareholder value. Even if a set of opinions about
programs, employees, applicants, systems, and what have
you did match to some degree with the movement of share-
holder value, it is ludicrous to claim more than coincidence
without analysis. Carrying this ruse to the ridiculous, to take
one sample ...