[11625] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Need Help Articulating Internet Benefits
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sean McLinden)
Mon Apr 11 23:00:48 1994
Date: Mon, 11 Apr 1994 17:59:47 -0400 (EDT)
From: Sean McLinden <sean@dsl.pitt.edu>
To: baer@jessica.stanford.edu
Cc: com-priv@psi.com, sean mclinden <sean@cadre.dsl.pitt.edu>
In-Reply-To: <199404111625.JAA05790@jessica.Stanford.EDU>
On Mon, 11 Apr 1994 baer@jessica.stanford.edu wrote:
> Great! "Join the Internet and watch your employees learn skills and get new
> jobs elsewhere on company expense!"
That is one way of looking at it, but here is another. A smart company
will hire smart employees. Smart employees will realize that a company
which shows interest in their career development merits a similar concern
on the part of the employee.
Last year I spent over $2500/employee on employee retraining. I fully
realized that I was preparing some of these employees to seek employment,
elsewhere. I also realized that for many of these employees, this
investment in their education made them aware of how important they were
to my organization. Our willingness to look beyond our immediate needs as
a company to their long-term needs as individuals was taken by them to be
a sign of our commitment to a future which included many of them.
I believe that in order for a company to be competitive with others it
must be competitive with itself. I needed to have bright, educated,
thinking employees working for me and the thought that some of my best
people might look elsewhere for employment focussed me on what I needed
to do to remain competitive as an employer of talented people.
I think that the attitude to which you refer is archaic and amounts to
little more than a slaveowners attempts to "hobble" the strongest and
fastest slaves to prevent their escape. If I am not a competitive
employer, I will never be a competitive player in the marketplace.
Sean
