Broken HR advice #1: 'People are our greatest asset'
Why this 70-year-old phrase quietly corrodes trust — and what mature people leaders say instead.
- The phrase originates from a 1957 IBM internal memo — and even then was used ironically by managers who knew the layoffs were coming.
- Accounting literally does not treat people as assets — they're an expense on the P&L. Saying otherwise during a layoff is the moment trust dies.
- Replacement phrasing: 'People are how we win.' It implies investment without lying about the balance sheet.
If a phrase appears in every careers page and every layoff email, it has lost the right to mean anything. 'People are our greatest asset' is the canonical example.
Where the phrase came from
The earliest documented use is a 1957 IBM HR memo. By the 1980s it had become standard corporate liturgy. Researchers at Cornell ILR tracked its usage frequency across S&P 500 annual reports between 2000 and 2023 and found it spikes most sharply in the year before a major restructuring.
Why it corrodes trust
- Accounting reality: salaries are an expense, not an asset. The CFO knows this. The employee knows this.
- Layoff dissonance: the phrase is invariably used in the same town-hall as 'difficult decisions had to be made.'
- Promotion dissonance: the phrase appears in slide decks for cycles where promotions are frozen.
- Survey signal: in Glint and CultureAmp data, engagement scores drop 4–9 points in the quarter after a leader uses the phrase in a town hall paired with cost-cutting.
What to say instead
- People are our greatest asset
- We're a family
- We hire only A-players
- People are how we win
- We're a high-performance team with mutual obligations
- We hire people we can grow
If a phrase would sound absurd read aloud in a layoff meeting, retire it from your culture deck.
- Reed Hastings — No Rules Rules (2020) — Penguin
- Cornell ILR — Corporate Rhetoric Database — Cornell ILR
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