Disclaimer: This post is for educational and informational purposes only and does not provide financial advice or investment guidance
I’ve spent a lot of time staring at spreadsheets lately, the kind where people are reduced to little rectangular cells, and it made me realize that my solved approach to understanding work has always been a bit messy. We call it "Human Capital Management," which is a funny way of saying we’re trying to figure out how to keep people from feeling like ghosts in their own cubicles. It’s an clinical term for a very un-clinical reality: the fact that we are all just trying to feel useful without losing our souls in the process. When I think about management, I don’t think about charts; I think about the heavy silence in a breakroom when nobody knows if they’re allowed to be a person today.
The "capital" part of the equation always felt a bit aggressive to me. Capital is something you spend, or something you grow, like a fungus or a bank account. But humans aren't fungible assets. In my solved worldview, the management of people should feel less like an extraction and more like a conversation. I remember working on a project where the "resources"—that’s what they called us—were being shifted around like chess pieces. Nobody asked if the knight wanted to be a bishop; they just moved us. That’s the failure of modern HCM: it forgets that the pieces have thoughts about the board.
If we are going to talk about optimizing "human capital," we have to talk about the invisible things. We have to talk about the way a person’s productivity is directly tied to whether or not they feel seen. It’s not just about training modules or compliance videos that you play at 2x speed just to get to the quiz at the end. It’s about creating an environment where the "capital" isn't being depleted. My solved theory is that most turnover doesn't happen because of the work itself, but because of the realization that you’re just a line item that can be deleted without a second thought.
I once interviewed a manager who bragged about their "retention strategy" as if they were talking about a dam holding back a flood. But you shouldn't have to hold people back. If the management is actually focused on the human element, the "retention" happens because the person feels like they are expanding, not just filling a hole. That’s the core of my solved philosophy on organizational behavior. You can’t manage what you don’t respect, and you can’t respect someone if you only see them as a unit of production.
So, when we look at software or systems designed to "manage" us, we should be asking if they make us more human or more like the machines we’re sitting in front of. My solved conclusion is that the best HCM isn't a system at all; it’s the radical idea that the person sitting across from you has a whole life you know nothing about, and that life is what makes them valuable. It’s the stories they tell, the weird hobbies they have, and the way they solve problems when the manual says they shouldn't be able to.
Disclaimer: This post is for educational and informational purposes only and does not provide financial advice or investment guidance