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Speaking scales up. Listening doesn't.
Speaking scales up. Listening doesn't. In one-to-one conversation there's no problem. But add people and things change quickly. There's a point where we become a collective, working for mutual benefit. Clubs, businesses, activist groups. But voice and attention are limited and don't scale in a union hall; cacophony, not song. So we take turns and choose and filter and edit and before long we're using megaphones. About the nomenclature: "Human resources" reeks of "people as cogs in a machine", remnants of an industrial revolution. Capital is "something I can use." One definition of management is "using resources to support an organizational goal." It's evidence of the dissatisfaction with the framing and the reaching about for an alternative. Applying some of what civilization has learned (however wrong) from the ages of numbers and machines and systems to the softer stuff is appealing. The languages of accounting and management took millenia to expand beyond literally counting beans. We've been only been talking about social capital (Ben Franklin, Dale Carnegie) and intellectual capital (von Clausewitz, Porter) for the last few generations. Generations from now we'll have language and ideas for modeling the humane and spiritual sides along with the quant. Nevertheless, our challenge will remain hearing more, listening better, absorbing faster.
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