The flour on Maya R.-M.’s hands is a persistent, chalky reminder of the 12 hours she has already spent leaning over the cooling racks. It is 3:22 in the morning. Outside the bakery, the world is a bruised purple, but inside, the light from the 2 flickering fluorescent tubes creates a clinical, jittery atmosphere that doesn’t quite match the warmth of the sourdough starters. Maya is a third-shift baker, a title that sounds romantic until you realize it means your primary social interactions are with 52 pounds of rye flour and a silent industrial mixer. She is currently staring at a printed memo left by the new regional manager, a document that describes her and her 2 colleagues not as people who smell of cinnamon and lack of sleep, but as “non-optimized units of production.”

In the meeting Maya attended earlier this week, a consultant in a suit that probably cost $222 more than Maya’s monthly rent stood in front of a whiteboard. He didn’t talk about bread… Instead, he talked about “optimizing our human capital resources.” He looked directly at Dave from marketing-Dave, whose wife just had their 2nd baby, a child currently keeping Dave awake for 12 hours a day-and spoke about the need to “recalibrate our personnel footprint.”

The jargon of finance is a sedative for the conscience.

There is a specific, jagged cruelty in that language. By calling Dave a “resource,” the consultant is essentially putting him in the same category as the 52 bags of flour in the pantry or the 2 delivery trucks in the parking lot. You can discard a resource. You can liquidate an asset. You can burn a rate. But it is much harder to look a man in the eye and tell him that his 2-week-old daughter’s future is less important than the quarterly margin. So, we invent a new language. We build a wall of syllables to protect ourselves from the weight of our own decisions.

I once made the mistake of thinking this was just efficiency… I was wrong. Objectivity is fine for the 222 items on an inventory list, but it is a poison when applied to the people who move those items. Think about the term “assets.” It sounds solid, doesn’t it? It sounds like something you want to have 102 of. But when you categorize a team as an asset, you are fundamentally stripping them of their agency. Maya R.-M. isn’t an asset; she is the reason the neighborhood smells like home at sunrise.

The Permanent Brain Freeze

The language of modern business is a permanent brain freeze. It numbs the parts of us that are supposed to feel the impact of our actions. We talk about “lowering the cost of delivery” instead of “cutting the health insurance of 12 families.” We talk about “synergistic alignment” instead of “forcing 2 people to do the work of 32.” It is a linguistic mask, and like all masks, it eventually becomes heavy.

It felt like living inside a calculator, and let me tell you, there is no air in there. Maya R.-M. picks up a 2-pound bag of salt. She knows that if you rush the proofing process by 12 minutes, the bread will look fine on the outside but have no heart on the inside. Business is the same. You can optimize the numbers until the spreadsheet glows with perfection, but if you have crushed the spirit of the 22 people who do the work, you have created a hollow product.

The most expensive mistake a business can make is forgetting that its ledger is a biography of people.

The Imperative of Humanity

To speak with emotion or empathy in a boardroom is often seen as a weakness, as if the 2 things are mutually exclusive. But the greatest businesses in history weren’t built by “human capital resources.” They were built by people who were obsessed with a 2-line problem and solved it together. When we strip the humanity out of our speech, we invite mediocrity.

We need to stop treating business as a separate dimension where the rules of human decency are suspended in favor of “fiscal responsibility.” True fiscal responsibility includes the preservation of the people who generate the revenue. If your 12-page financial plan requires you to treat your staff like interchangeable parts, your plan is flawed.