Intent & Capability. Never Resources.

Fifteen years ago, I walked into my first program management role and heard something that made me wince. A senior executive was discussing headcount planning and casually referred to our engineering team as "resources to be allocated." These weren't spreadsheet entries - they were people I'd just spent weeks getting to know. Anupam, who could debug anything after his morning chai. Asha, who had this uncanny ability to spot design flaws before they became disasters. Sandeep, who'd been coding since before most of us owned computers.

That's when it hit me. Every corporate objective, every ambitious target we set, comes down to two things: Intent and Capability.

Intent isn't just leadership saying they want better outcomes for customers. Real intent is when you see a VP rolling up their sleeves at 8 PM because they genuinely believe the solution matters. It's the difference between hitting quarterly numbers and actually solving problems that keep people awake at night.

But here's what I've learned managing teams across Mumbai, London, and Singapore - capability isn't just budget allocation. Yes, you need financial backing. But true organizational capability? That's when someone like Sandeep decides to stay back and mentor a junior developer, not because his KRAs demand it, but because he remembers when someone did the same for him. It's when Asha suggests a completely different approach that saves six months of work, because she feels heard and valued enough to speak up.

I've seen companies with massive budgets fail spectacularly because they treated people like interchangeable components. And I've watched small teams punch way above their weight because leadership understood that behind every successful program is someone who chose to care about it.

Maybe it's time we retired "human resources" altogether. How about "Human Capability" instead? Because the moment we start talking about people as resources, we've already missed the point.

What do you think? Does the language we use in corporate environments shape how we actually treat people?