[exasperaited]

Post '08? All of this dates from the US stock market reforms of the 1970s, ultimately, which led to an explosion of IPOs, and fed the explosive growth of management consultancy and MBA culture. "Business" became something one specialised in as a career farming a quasi-commodity.

The culture of the "exit" is the problem; the notion of routine payment with stock options, etc. etc.

Back when I was working in a dot com (well a dot co dot uk) I noticed this; if you ask for a hard salary in lieu of stock options you are treated as if you have a communicable disease. Something I am glad I did, actually, because I saw other people leave with vested options that the company refused to either honour or buy back.

Everything about the subsequent 21st Century IT culture is short-term-ist, naïve, and sick, and it is still taboo to talk about some of the problems.

[slashdave]

I wouldn't blame this on MBAs. The fault lays in the culture of the Board Room. There used to be a time that the board cared about the welfare of employees and the good of society as a whole. I know this is hard to believe in contemporary times.

[exasperaited]

I struggle to find things in the modern business world that cannot be blamed on the culture of the MBA. What you are talking about — boards not caring about the welfare of employees — is a fundamental result of the culture of the MBA, which has suffused through all business thought in a way that casually depersonalises and humiliates.

I used to work for a small business and I decided I would have to quit one day when my boss said, on the phone to a client, "yes, I've got a resource for that".

There were four of us.

[quesera]

This one trips me up. Why are we sensitive about the word "resource"?

Literally nothing about the word "resource" has negative connotations for me. Resources are finite and precious. They are protected and important.

Sometimes they are exploited and undervalued, sure. What isn't? Certainly not humans or employees.

Every project requires resources. Some of them are human. It's just a category.

Would you be less bothered if he said "I've got a human for that"? Or "I've got a worker for that"? "The staff to handle that need is available"?

I don't use the word, and the first time I heard it, I thought it was a little impersonal. But then I thought about it more, and I just don't understand the strength of reaction.

It might help that, in general, my goal is not to be seen as a living human being with real human complexity and needs and desires, at work.

[exasperaited]

> Would you be less bothered if he said "I've got a human for that"? Or "I've got a worker for that"? "The staff to handle that need is available"?

"I've got a worker" is still somewhat dehumanising. "I have the staff for that" is somewhat less dehumanising.

But, for example, "yes we have someone here that can work on this with you" is so obviously less dehumanising.

I find it surprising that people would ever be confused about this. Perhaps it is because I am British and that sort of language is impolite, rude and arrogant. Or perhaps it is rejection-sensitive dysphoria (a real problem for me) making me sensitive to descriptions of myself and people I care about that reduce us to interchangeable allocatable units.

But again, the basic thing here is: there were four of us. Only one of us was ever going to do that job because there were four of us and we had four different jobs. So why ever lurch towards the language of interchangeability, in earshot.

Four people in a small business cannot really ever be a "category". And you should never use a word for a person that can also be used for a photocopier or a dictionary. A person can be resourceful; they are never a resource.

[quesera]

How about something like "Yes, we have the resources to handle that project"?

> Four people in a small business cannot really ever be a "category".

Sure they can -- they are all employees, for example.

I agree that "resource" is an impersonal word when used for "staff" (largely because it can apply to non-human things). I just don't feel the need to be considered more than a resource at work.

I bring special skills and knowledge, I have no concern that I am an interchangeable cog in the wheel of industry -- and yet at the same time, I have no illusions that I cannot be replaced (on some possibly-inconvenient timescale for business operations, although certainly that has varied over time in my employment history).

Actually that raises an interesting question, I think. When I was in high school, I worked a few summer temp jobs as unskilled labor. If anyone had called me a "resource" then, it would have felt patronizingly euphemistic to the point of absurdity. I was just a body. So in that case "resource" would be a silly upgrade.

So I guess it comes down to context. I can see where a four-person company, especially if you've been there a while, has a much higher expectation of personal relationships.

You mentioned that your boss was on the phone. The other party to the conversation might have been further removed (org chart-wise) from their staff. They might think only in resource allocation and not know any names or capacities at the productive level in their own org, never mind yours. Since they are a client, your boss may have mirrored their language, even though he was speaking about a full human, and within earshot of that human.

I don't know, maybe your boss was just a jerk in general, and this word was enough to make you feel like it was a summary of how he thought about you.

But maybe it was just a word. Neither incorrect, nor intentionally offensive.

Obviously, words can be triggers. I'm in the camp that believes they should not be, for all sorts of logical reasons, but I'm not an absolutist. Some words are intended to be triggering, for example, and although I think it's a mistake to give them that power, I understand it's not that simple and that I speak from a position of privilege.

However, I don't think that "resource" has reached the point of social awareness that it is actually offensive to some people. I think that most people who use the word intend no offense, and are not thinking in a way that, if fully explained, would be offensive.

[dogleash]

>Why are we sensitive about the word "resource"?

It's simple dehumanization. It's not outlandish or anything, it's just really easy to notice. And the sophistry to try make them equivalent terms is also easy to notice.

For a business to need resources it means a category of stuff that can include people, tools, raw materials, etc... Using the name of a category to mean one thing inside it instead of explicitly naming that one thing is concealment. Just like how I might say "fertilizer" instead of "cow shit."

The better question is why we started concealing it. Why are we so sensitive about the words person, employee, or personnel?

[frm88]

Because starting from the 1980's corporate organisation was focused on managing resources, of which humans were a part that had to be dehumanized to fit with the rest of the theory. There was a brief phase where it was called HCM - human capital management, but that never caught on widely; so HRM it is with a focus on managing as opposed to organising and supporting. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/evolution-hr-terminology-why-...

[exasperaited]

Human capital is even worse!

[coldpie]

> when my boss said, on the phone to a client, "yes, I've got a resource for that".

Hahaha, I got hit with that, too, also working for a small company. Luckily it was the client who called me "a resource", not someone from my company, but good lord what a way that is to talk about human beings.

[amarant]

Aren't contemporary boardrooms generally stuffed to the brim with MBA's though? Or is that just my preconceptions talking?

[slashdave]

The Board represents shareholders, at least in principle. More celebrities really.

[ambicapter]

What were the "the US stock market reforms of the 1970s", roughly?

[exasperaited]

OK so I am not an expert here at all, but my broad contention is that much of the modern way business works traces back to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Stock_Brokerage_Commissio...

The equivalent in the UK — the Big Bang — was very much fresh in the minds of my leftie economics teachers in 1990 :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_(financial_markets)

On top of the creation of NASDAQ and subsequent NYSE reforms that opened up electronic trading and allowed banks to start selling stocks, these things meant that ordinary people, individuals, etc., developed more of an interest in the stock market and of "business" as an abstract.

This did two things: first it means that there's so much more heat around IPOs and so much more interest in them. But there's also an amateur/individual obsession with quarterly performance over the slower, institutionalised trading that went before it.

That changes the culture of business, Wall Street and London so much that it fuels the market for business schools, MBAs, economics degrees.

Then once you have the broker-driven (and exchange-competition-driven) obsession with the hunt for IPOs, you start to see the modern venture capital market, and thirty years later after a few crashes, the reactive rebirth of private equity.

But before these reforms, people on the streets in either country did not really have access to the stock market, and stock trading was sort of a gentlemen's club: they were absolutely furious that the fixed commission era was ending.

Fixed commission regulated by the SEC is such an alien concept now.

The startups I worked for in the late 1990s in the UK simply could not ever have happened before the Big Bang. The entire culture of venture capital changed.

[ambicapter]

So it seems like kind of a mixed bag of democratizing access, but which also created a little more individualized, selfish pressures on the way the market behaves.