Many years ago, while working in a large corporation, a frustrated executive shouted at HR during a management meeting: “Your department should be called the inhuman resources department!”
That moment planted a question that has only grown more relevant since. Two reasons keep bringing it back.
First, in a period of almost weekly layoff announcements, doesn’t the word “resources” already carry, from the very start, a propensity to disposability? Second, in the era of AI, an era where a system screens candidates, drafts communications, manages schedules, and advises on strategy, isn’t the word “inhuman” actually quite accurate?
Moreover, a quiet but persistent tension has haunted HR for more than sixty years: are organisations managing Human Resources, or nurturing Human Relations? Same acronym, quite a different viewpoint. That debate, first framed by Raymond Miles in the Harvard Business Review in 1965, has never been fully resolved. But something more unsettling has now arrived: a multifaceted new colleague that has never been interviewed, onboarded, or assessed for values alignment.
Marco Mancesti has spent two decades at the intersection of strategy, leadership, and organisational dynamics. What this article asks, directly and without irony, is whether organisations need not just a reinvented HR, but a genuinely separate governance function, an Inhuman Resources department. Not as a dark joke. As a strategic imperative.