I've been attending (and presenting at) HR.com's VIEW conference (see my HCM blog for details). Carly Fiorina provided the opening keynote, and one of her points caught my attention. She said that people aren't the soft stuff - they're the software, ie the clever stuff.
I agree with her on people not being the soft stuff, and you'll find plenty on my HCM blog about this to. I also recommend Scott McArthur's blog, particularly this post.
However, in this post, I wanted to extend on Fiorina's point about people being the software. You could see:
- Human capital as the software sitting on each individual PC
- Organisation capital as the hardware - particularly the computer networks linking different PCs together
- Social capital as the intra and inter net, including web 2.0.