Human Resources

It is an odd world in which humans are considered resources rather than resource consumers. The terms 'human resources' and 'human resource management' are new terms, coined at the beginning of the 20th century. They suffered a brief dip after each of the World Wars, but generally soared unchecked in popularity until the turn of the millennium, at which they began to trend downwards again. [NGram]

Clearly, then, this evil idea is a product of the rational thought process of homo economicus run wild. There is a point at which humans become numbers and factors of production in a calculable way. It is very close to the point at which the trains run on time as bodies are delivered to death camps.

After 20 years of analysing corporate bodies, organisations and institutions of various kinds, it has dawned on me that the most evil character in the cast of corporate management must be the HR manager. This is often a loser who interacts badly with other humans and thus can only survive by treating them as non-human entities while sucking up to the humans not within its purview.

I'm fairly certain not all HR managers are bad. But the nature of the job is exploitative and soul-destroying unless done with incredible attention to ethical behaviours and moral consequences. It is far easier for a rich man to... sorry, that's been said by a far wiser person before me.

Repeat after me: "Humans are not resources to be consumed, used, exploited, allocated or manipulated." This will make you a more ethical person. But HR managers can't do this. Rather, they have little choice but to embrace the dark side if they want to keep doing what they do. Hence the HR icon of this era, Scott Adams's 'Catbert the Evil HR Director'.

The Five Percent Rule

It has long been heuristically suspected that in any population, only about 1 in 20 will actually achieve a performance that is at a level of 1 in 100 or better (i.e. better than 99% of the population's performances). This kind of supposition is not always true of all populations, but it is a good heuristic.

Look around you. Who is the best person in your class, group, set or other population for a given task? Is that person capable of beating 99% of all performances by your population? That person must be at the very worst a 1-in-20 phenomenon — in a group of 40, only 2 such are expected.

In a staff of say 300 people, this would mean not more than 15 are A-class. By this I mean using a measure of something like: A = top 1%, B = next 4-5%, C = next 10-15% and D = next 25% or so. Anyone after the top 45-50% should be considered a failure.

Why? Because in such populations, the people have already been selected for the job. If they can't do the job well, the question that should be asked is, "Why are they so bad?"

And this is one of the reasons that I believe all human resource executives and suchlike should be fired. They appear to serve no useful purpose at all and I am willing to think that basic filters plus luck-of-the-draw would do better.