For example, the CFO Research (2003) report that I
referred to in Chapter 6 asks, ‘what is your return on aggre-
gate investments in human capital?’ I hope I have already
shown that this isn’t a terribly sensible thing to expect
people or organizations to know. I’m certainly not against a
broad understanding of return, but I don’t believe that dis-
tilling this down to a single metric helps. What does help is
using an appropriate measurement framework that enables
a conversation to be had about aggregate investments, the
sorts of outputs that have been achieved, and the financial
return that may possibly be linked to this.