Turnover ... a potential indicator of longevity?

I think there's a lot of lottery-playing going on right now. Companies staffing up, raising a bunch of money, hiring a bunch of people, and burning them out in the hopes that they'll hit the lottery. ...all you have to do is read TechCrunch. Look at what the top stories are, and they're all about raising money, how many employees they have, and these are metrics that don't matter. What matters is: Are you profitable? Are you building something great? Are you taking care of your people? Are you treating your customers well? In the coverage of our industry as a whole, you'll rarely see stories about treating customers well, about people building a sustainable business. ...I don't know what percentage of tech companies have been around 30 years.

In this article from Fast Company, co-founder of 37 Signals Jason Fried, talks about building a sustainable business, in it for the long haul. He decries the tech start-up culture of burning out and churning though employees.

After reading it I was left wondering: could rates of employee turnover be an indicator of long term viability and success?

Measuring An Employee's Worth? Consider Influence via Fast Company

Chatter, which was launched two years ago, is not the only company working on a metric for influence within organizations. Yammer and National Field, other enterprise social networking tools, are also taking a stab at the problem.

The most progressive organizations have always realized that the informal connections employees make with others and the amount of knowledge and expertise they share outside of prescribed work responsibilities contributes mightily to the bottom line. But until now, they haven't had an empirical way of measuring that activity.

via fastcompany.com