"and it was surprisingly difficult to quantify the impact that terminating an employee or cutting benefits would have on morale/culture/performance"

I think it is not surprising, when you consider that a precise weather forecast for more than 3 days is usually considered impossible.

When you deal with very complex systems, where small changes can have a big effect via self enforcing feedback loops - how can you expect to calculate all that?

And human social dynamics seem to be at least as complicated as the global weather.