The worst thing we ever did in corporate America was to take the most vital part of any company – the people powering it – and label it so dismissively as “human resources.”
We reduced talent to a simple asset: one to be standardized, controlled, commoditized, and managed like any other form of capital. We created a department whose sole purpose is to extract value and enforce compliance, and put them in charge of an ecosystem built around formalized processes, sameness, common practices, and conformity.
The result is the institutionalized mediocrity plaguing many legacy companies today. A pandemic that will only become more problematic as we advance into the post-digital age: a world of agile, talent-focused companies that are set up to disrupt, excel and grow.
