Why this exists
A small stand for humanity at work.
This started with a small, specific annoyance. Hearing good people, real humans with lives outside of work, described in meetings as “resources”. As if they were server capacity. Or staplers.
It matters. Language is where culture is quietly built or quietly corroded. Call someone a resource for long enough and you start making resource-shaped decisions about them. Compassion, humanity and psychological safety suffer as a result.
The way to fix it isn’t a values poster and a pool table. It’s a thousand small choices to treat people like people, starting with what you call them.
So this is a movement, with no end date. No apologies, no pretending compassion and commercial sense are enemies. Instead a steady, slightly tongue-in-cheek insistence on one obvious idea: People are not resources.
What we hold to
Treat people with compassion
Dignity, kindness and common humanity aren’t up for debate. It’s also really good for business.
Quietly subversive
We aim the wit at the language and the systems, never at a named person.
Always constructive
Every joke comes with something genuinely useful attached.
Who’s behind it
This is run by Clem Pickering, a leadership coach, trainer and facilitator with a background in the tech industry, who for years has been increasingly ticked off hearing humans described as resources. So he decided to throw a spanner, albeit a small one, in the works, and People are not resources was born. It’s also a platform to share more information and, ahem, resources, relating to compassionate leadership. You can find out more about Clem at clementpickering.com or on LinkedIn.