Alex, This point is spot on - "Increasingly, modern business is becoming a complex, distributed information processing system. The nodes of this system are employees." Even for the most social high performers, it takes at least 2 months to establish and develop functional working relationships with other people within a distributed system - building the trust that excellent teams enjoy takes even longer. When a node (employee) is removed, the network shifts to adjust - people pick up the slack caused by the missing node by strengthening other connections, and workflow, ideas and communication gets re-routed. Because of this, plugging someone back in doesn't automatically guarantee that the human network will work the same way that it did before. The more connected the node in the system, the harder it is to replace. Good insight. - Steffan Antonas from FriendFeed MT Plugin

The idea that business today is different from the past in such a way that 2 months onboarding time is unacceptable... That's completely ludicrous. If your business processes are such that the system collapses upon the abscence of a given individual, your process is garbage. People are brittle creatures. They have breakdowns, they die, and they don't always give notice or warning before these things happen. Now if your outlook is coming from a perspective of startups which run lean and take considerable risks, sure an individual employee going AWOL could destroy the processes you have created - thats a cost of risks a business may choose to take early on. But in large businesses especially, there is no excuse for not having cross-training and cross-fertilization of responsibilities. There are efficient ways to achieve functional redundancy, and that should be a management goal where appropriate. Claiming that "business" is somehow fundamentally different these days is a harhsly misguided premise. - Matt Bidinger from FriendFeed MT Plugin

Michael Gartenberg has a line that he taught me: the cemeteries are full of people who thought they weren't replaceable. - Robert Scoble

If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted. - Robert Hafer

Everyone is replaceable. There always comes a time that the cost of keeping a person in a position exceeds the impact cost of removing them, whether the change is for positive or negative reasons, promotion or firing. - Ian D. Nock