Converting “Human Resources” to Creative Swarms
We are not resources. We are not capital. We are not talent. We are not labor. We are not manpower. We are bees. We are all members of the same swarm. In preindustrial times, people were like bees, creating what they needed, growing their grain, baking their bread, sewing and stitching their clothes, and building their furniture and houses. With the onset of industrialization, division of labor arose, and managers started to manage their resources - one of which happened to be their human resources. But humans don’t particularly like to be resources – being a resource implies being a passive asset, which is being moved around like a pawn in a game of chess, without agency and own will. Synonyms like “human capital”, “talent”, “labor”, or “manpower” are not much better. “Human capital” is even worse, as it conveys the connotation of foreign ownership: according to definition, capital is an asset owned by an individual or organization available for a purpose s