In established professions, recognition typically flows from institutions that have developed over time. Medicine, law, engineering, and the sciences all possess formal structures that anchor credibility. Universities teach standardized bodies of knowledge. Professional associations regulate entry and conduct. Licensing systems ensure that those who claim expertise have met specific criteria. Peer-reviewed journals provide a mechanism for evaluating ideas and contributions. Because these structures exist, recognition in those fields tends to emerge organically through demonstrated achievement rather than self-nomination. Awards exist, of course, but they are usually secondary to the deeper institutional scaffolding that defines the profession.

Customer Experience evolved along a hugely different path. It did not emerge from a university discipline, nor did it originate within a single profession. Instead, it formed at the intersection of marketing, service management, user experience design, analytics, and organizational change. The result was a field rich in ideas but relatively thin in institutional foundations. There is no universal curriculum for CX, no licensing body that defines who may practice it, and no widely accepted hierarchy of credentials that signals mastery. In such an environment, recognition mechanisms fill the vacuum.

Awards and rankings function as informal markers of authority when formal ones do not yet exist. They create the appearance of hierarchy in a landscape where hierarchy is otherwise unclear. When someone is named among the “Top 100 CX Leaders,” it offers a shorthand signal to others that this person’s voice carries weight. When a company wins a “Customer Centricity Award,” it provides a symbol executives can display as evidence of progress. These recognitions operate less as definitive judgments and more as social signals that help participants navigate an evolving professional community.

Another factor driving the proliferation of awards in CX is the consulting and vendor ecosystem that surrounds the discipline. Customer Experience has become a significant commercial marketplace. Consulting firms advise companies on CX strategy and transformation. Software vendors sell platforms designed to measure, orchestrate, or improve customer journeys. Conference organizers convene practitioners and thought leaders around emerging practices. In such an ecosystem, visibility becomes a valuable currency.

Awards serve that visibility economy. Winning organizations gain marketing assets they can showcase to clients or customers. Consultants gain credibility that helps them attract engagements. Conferences gain prestige by associating themselves with recognized leaders. Even participants who do not win still contribute to the ecosystem by submitting case studies, speaking at events, or promoting the program within their networks. The awards themselves become part of the commercial infrastructure that sustains the broader industry.

None of this necessarily means the recognition is dishonest or meaningless. Many awards highlight genuinely impressive work. Organizations do undertake real efforts to improve how they serve their customers, and individuals do contribute valuable insights to the field. The challenge lies in the way recognition is structured. When participants nominate themselves and present their own narratives of success, the process inevitably rewards those who are most skilled at telling compelling stories about their work. The distinction between excellence and effective self-presentation becomes difficult to separate.

This dynamic can be uncomfortable for practitioners who came into Customer Experience through operational leadership or long careers in service improvement. Their understanding of the discipline often centers on systems, governance, metrics, and organizational change—work that unfolds gradually and rarely lends itself to neat narratives of transformation. They know that building a durable CX capability inside a company can take years of patient effort. It involves aligning incentives, reshaping processes, and influencing culture across departments that do not naturally collaborate. Such work is difficult to capture in a single awards submission.

The paradox is that Customer Experience may eventually outgrow its current fascination with recognition programs. As the discipline matures, stronger foundations will likely emerge. Universities are already developing CX-related curricula. Professional associations are beginning to standardize frameworks and competencies. Organizations are integrating CX responsibilities into broader operational leadership roles rather than treating them as standalone initiatives. Over time, these developments may anchor the field more firmly within the larger landscape of management practice.

When that happens, recognition may look different. Instead of lists and badges, credibility will come increasingly from demonstrated results and institutional reputation. The most respected voices will be those whose work has produced lasting change inside organizations or advanced the discipline through rigorous thought and teaching. Awards will still exist, but they will likely play a smaller role in defining who matters in the field.

Until then, the abundance of recognition programs tells us something important about Customer Experience. It reflects a discipline still in the process of defining its identity. In the absence of formal structures, the community has built its own signals of legitimacy. Awards, rankings, and leader lists are simply the visible artifacts of that search for definition.

Seen in this light, the phenomenon is less a sign of vanity than of adolescence. CX is a young profession still growing into its future. And like many young professions before it, it is experimenting with ways to recognize itself while it continues the deeper work of becoming something more enduring.

— Karl Sharicz

I have lived long enough to see this country move through difficult chapters. Division, conflict, and uncertainty are not new to us. But there has always been, however imperfectly maintained, a boundary between disagreement and dehumanization. That boundary is not just a social preference—it is a structural necessity within any functioning democracy. Once that line begins to blur, the system itself starts to behave differently. People are no longer participants within a shared framework; they are recast as obstacles within it.

From a systems perspective, this shift is not incidental. Systems are shaped by the language we use and the patterns we reinforce. When the language of “enemy” is introduced into internal discourse, it alters the dynamics of the system. It creates reinforcing loops of suspicion and separation. Institutions that are designed to support dialogue—journalism, education, libraries—begin to be seen not as contributors to collective understanding, but as potential threats. The system, over time, adapts to this framing. It narrows. It hardens. It becomes less capable of holding complexity.

What concerns me is not simply the presence of disagreement, but the gradual normalization of categorizing people into degrees of worthiness. When access to care, support, or even basic dignity becomes condition—based on alignment with a particular set of beliefs, we begin to move away from a principle that has long anchored us at our best: that we are, first and foremost, human beings. Systems that begin to rank human value inevitably produce outcomes that reflect that hierarchy, often in ways that extend far beyond the original intent.

I find myself thinking about this not only as a citizen, but as a grandfather. Seven young lives, each with their own paths ahead of them, are growing into a world that is being shaped right now by the choices we make. And the question that stays with me is not framed in political terms, but in human ones: what will they come to experience as normal? Will they inherit a system that encourages curiosity about difference, or one that teaches them to be wary of it? Will they learn to engage with opposing views as part of a shared civic responsibility, or to dismiss them as threats to be eliminated?

I do not have answers to these questions, but I do believe that the idea of “the enemy within” reveals more about how we are choosing to see one another than it does about any actual threat. When we begin to define fellow citizens as enemies, we introduce a pattern into the system that is self-reinforcing. The more we look for division, the more we find it. The more we find it, the more justified it appears. Over time, this becomes less a reaction and more a condition of the system itself.

If there is something worth resisting, it is not a particular viewpoint or ideology, but the drift toward that condition. The work in front of us may not be as visible or as immediate as the headlines suggest. It is quieter, more deliberate, and perhaps more difficult. It asks us to hold on to the ability to recognize humanity in those with whom we disagree. It requires a level of discipline to listen before we label, and a willingness to remain engaged even when that engagement feels uncomfortable.

Because in the end, the strength of any society is not measured by how well it aligns with itself, but by how well it can hold together in the presence of difference. The future our grandchildren inherit will not be shaped solely by the decisions of those in power, but by the patterns we choose to reinforce in our everyday interactions. Systems change not only through policy, but through the accumulation of small, repeated choices.

And perhaps that is where this begins—not with defining an enemy within, but with resisting the need to define one at all.

— Karl Sharicz

In a leadership meeting, a senior executive calmly stated, “We’ll need to redeploy three resources from that unit.” No one flinched. No one asked who. No one paused. Three resources. Not Michael. Not Denise. Not the analyst who had just relocated her family for the role. Just three resources, and the meeting moved on.

The moment lingered afterward — not because it was overtly cruel, but because it was entirely ordinary. Language that might once have felt jarring now passes without friction. That ordinariness is precisely why it deserves examination.

From Name to Instrument

For much of history, individuals at work were identified by name or by craft — a machinist, a teacher, a carpenter. Even in eras when labor conditions were harsh, language retained some link to identity. There was recognition of skill, contribution, and personhood. The word resource, by contrast, comes from a different lineage. Historically, it referred to reserves — timber, minerals, capital, energy — something available to be drawn upon in pursuit of an objective. It is an instrumental term. A resource exists for use.

As industrialization matured and management science developed in the twentieth century, labor became measurable, optimizable, and systematized. Productivity could be calculated. Output could be compared. Efficiency was elevated to principle. Workers, however, were still called workers. The more decisive shift came later, when large organizations adopted planning frameworks that grouped people alongside materials and capital under a single category called “resources.” Leaders could now discuss “resource allocation” without distinguishing between equipment and human beings. The grammar changed, and grammar shapes imagination.

The Logic of Scale

Small enterprises resist abstraction because proximity resists abstraction. In smaller environments, leaders know the people who work beside them. Illness, celebration, stress, and growth are visible, and decisions carry faces.

Scale alters that dynamic. As organizations expand across regions and continents, systems thinking becomes essential. Financial reporting requires uniform categories. Planning models depend on interchangeable units. Names become headcount. Roles become full-time equivalents. People become resources.

This shift is not necessarily malicious; it is efficient. Efficiency enables coordination at scale. Yet abstraction carries a cost. It reduces emotional friction. It becomes easier to move numbers than to confront lives. It is easier to “reduce resources by ten percent” than to tell ten individuals that their stability has been deemed expendable. Abstraction does not eliminate compassion, but it makes detachment easier.

The Language That Prepared the Ground

Automation did not begin with artificial intelligence. Machines have replaced physical labor for centuries. What artificial intelligence introduces is substitution in areas once considered uniquely human — analysis, pattern recognition, and elements of judgment. When people are framed primarily as resources, substitution becomes conceptually seamless. If a person is defined by utility, and a technological tool performs that utility more efficiently, the transition feels rational and even responsible.

The shift in language toward resource-based thinking prepared the ground long before the algorithms arrived. Artificial intelligence did not invent abstraction; it inherited it. When organizations speak of optimization, they smooth the moral edges of replacement. One does not “replace” a person named Thomas who has mentored younger colleagues for twenty years; one optimizes resource allocation. Language lowers the resistance that might otherwise slow the decision.

The Asymmetry We Rarely Notice

There is a revealing irony in modern business rhetoric. Externally, organizations increasingly speak in human terms. They champion empathy, invest in customer experience, and design for emotional connection. Customers are described as people with preferences, anxieties, and stories. Internally, however, the language often remains clinical. Employees are discussed in terms of utilization rates and allocation models. Workforce changes are framed as resource optimization.

Whether intentional or not, the split in language reveals a cultural divide. Over time, that imbalance shapes how decisions are justified. We re-humanize externally while abstracting internally. Customers are treated as people whose emotions and experiences matter; employees are discussed as units of capacity whose allocation must be optimized. The fracture does not lie in technology alone. It lies in the divide between how humanity is framed when it drives revenue and how it is framed when it affects cost.

Did the Word Cause the Decline?

It would be historically simplistic to argue that the word “resource” caused a decline in humanity within business. Exploitation and indifference long predate modern management vocabulary. The Industrial Revolution was not humane simply because it lacked contemporary terminology. However, language does not need to cause a condition to reinforce it. Vocabulary stabilizes worldviews. It normalizes assumptions. It makes certain decisions feel procedural rather than consequential.

The widespread use of resource-based language reflects a broader shift toward systemization and financial logic as dominant lenses in organizational life. Once that lens becomes primary, relational awareness requires deliberate effort. It no longer arises naturally. The issue is not the word alone but the comfort with which it fits into the prevailing logic of efficiency.

Remembering What the System Cannot See

Modern organizations cannot function without systems. Systems require categories, and categories require abstraction. There is no realistic return to purely relational enterprises operating at village scale. The deeper question is whether leaders can hold two truths at once: that optimization is necessary and that optimization involves human beings whose worth exceeds their utility. Every resource has a name, every headcount has a history, and every allocation decision carries a human consequence beyond the spreadsheet cell.

If that reality is forgotten, the erosion will not arrive dramatically. It will arrive quietly in meetings where no one flinches when three people become three resources. The measure of humanity in business may not be whether technology advances — it will — but whether organizations notice when the vocabulary of efficiency begins to replace the vocabulary of dignity and whether they are willing to reintroduce names into rooms where only numbers are being discussed. Once language loses the person, the system will not put them back.

The Central Challenge Before Us

The question ultimately moves beyond semantics and becomes a central challenge to all of us in the PurposeFully Human community: how do we lead with humanity in all the ways it matters, in all places, and for all time? The language of scale and efficiency created a powerful legacy paradigm. It enabled growth, coordination, global reach, and extraordinary innovation. It also worked its way silently but inexorably into dashboards, planning frameworks, financial models, and the everyday vocabulary of organizations.

When language shifts, perception follows. When perception shifts, justification becomes easier. Words are not neutral, and abstraction, left unchecked, gradually narrows moral imagination. A moratorium — formal or informal — on the use of the word “resource” when referring to people would not dismantle modern systems, but it might restore necessary friction. Insisting that real people be named is not sentimental; it is grounding. It requires leaders to confront the human weight of decisions that spreadsheets render weightless.

Leading with humanity does not mean rejecting efficiency. It means refusing to let efficiency become the only vocabulary available. The legacy paradigm of scale will not vanish, but leadership includes the authority to redefine norms. Perhaps the most practical place to begin is the simplest: in the words we allow ourselves to use.

***(Acknowledgment: Jerry Seufert asked the question that sparked this exploration; I conducted the research and writing. AI-assisted editorial refinement tools were used in shaping this essay; the ideas, structure, and conclusions are my own.)

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Corporate Dialect and the Illusion of Clarity

A recent conversation with my Purpose Fully Human colleague Jerry Seufert began with something deceptively simple - the increasing use of corporate acronyms and jargon. Phrases like “circle back,” “bandwidth,” “pivot,” “alignment,” “at the end of the day,” and “low hanging fruit” are so embedded in organizational life that we barely notice them. That latter phrase has made me at times want to respond with, “If it’s that low-hanging, why hasn’t it already been picked?” or “Are we talking about real opportunity, or are we just chasing after the easiest thing to do?”

They sound efficient and professional. Yet when translated into plain language, their meaning often shifts. “Circle back” usually means we do not yet have an answer. “Bandwidth” signals overload. “Pivot” softens the admission that something did not work. “Alignment” suggests disagreement remains.

These expressions are not inherently harmful, and in some contexts they serve as shorthand. Over time, however, this vocabulary can obscure rather than clarify. It protects the speaker from vulnerability and replaces directness with performance. When language becomes performance, communication begins to lose its humanity.

For those working in Customer Experience, this matters. Organizations invest heavily in journey mapping, metrics, and personalization strategies, yet the most immediate component of any experience is language. The words used in meetings shape culture. The words used in customer communications shape trust. If CX aims to reduce friction, unnecessary linguistic complexity is itself a form of friction.

Language and Belonging

Language does more than clarify tasks; it signals who belongs. Not everyone in the modern workplace shares the same background, culture, or lived experience. Yet many organizations still operate as though the “default employee” is narrow and uniform. When leadership language subtly reinforces that default — through coded terms, selective praise, or insider labels — it communicates who is valued.

Consider how someone from a minority background might feel if described as “articulate,” a word that can unintentionally imply surprise. Or how similar behaviors are labeled “passionate” in one person and “emotional” in another. Terms such as “aggressive,” “culture fit,” or even “professional” can carry assumptions that often go unexamined. These phrases are rarely malicious, yet they reveal how language can reinforce hierarchy and shape opportunity.

In one organization that I worked with, I observed leaders openly identify selected employees as “high potentials,” or “hypos.” Intended as a development designation, the label created a visible hierarchy. Everyone knew who was included and who was not. Over time, the language itself shaped experience. Those outside the designation felt diminished, and those within it were perceived as aligned with existing power structures. The vocabulary did more than categorize; it influenced confidence, voice, and belonging.

From a CX perspective, this is not merely an internal matter. Culture inevitably influences customer experience. Employees who feel marginalized or unheard do not suddenly become engaged ambassadors of the brand. The human experience inside the organization shapes the experience outside it — a principle long understood in CX.

How Leaders Set the Tone

Language does not simply communicate intent; it communicates culture. In some organizations, senior leaders adopt a deliberately informal or provocative tone — including the use of expletives — both internally and publicly. This may be framed as authenticity or boldness. Yet leadership language carries amplified weight.

What might seem casual at an individual level becomes cultural at a positional level. When those at the top consistently use abrasive or profane language, it establishes norms. It signals what is acceptable and influences how safe it feels to speak, disagree, or express uncertainty. For some employees, such tone may feel energizing; for others, intimidating or dismissive. Customers and stakeholders inevitably draw conclusions about maturity, judgment, and respect.

Leadership language is instructional. It teaches people how to behave.

Accountability, therefore, rests heavily with those in authority. Leaders are not merely participants in culture; they are primary authors of it. The vocabulary they normalize either reinforces psychological safety or erodes it. It either communicates steadiness and clarity or signals volatility and ego.

In CX terms, tone is part of the experience architecture. It is not cosmetic. It influences engagement, loyalty, and advocacy. Organizations that carefully design customer journeys but neglect the linguistic tone set by leadership risk misalignment between stated values and lived experience.

Designing for Humans

David has written that we remain always human and only sometimes customers. The same is true within organizations. Employees are always human and only sometimes defined by their roles. When language reduces people to categories, labels, or loyalty tests, it narrows the space for humanity.

Designing for humans rather than abstract “customers” begins internally. It begins with conversations that allow dissent without punishment. It begins with leaders who admit uncertainty without hiding behind jargon. It begins with recognizing that profit and humanity are not opposing forces, though language often reveals which one truly dominates.

We cannot control every aspect of experience, but we can control the words we normalize. Language can obscure responsibility or clarify it. It can reinforce hierarchy or invite participation. It can protect power or distribute it.

What Do Our Words Reveal?

If someone were to experience our organization only through the language we use — in meetings, in emails, in performance reviews, and in customer communications — what would they conclude about what we truly value?

— Karl Sharicz

There are frameworks, metrics, maturity models, best practices, and endless commentary on leadership. There are strong opinions about what works and what doesn’t. There are dominant voices and polished narratives.

This space is something quieter.

Purposeful Thoughts on Humanity is where I will examine the ideas that sit underneath the work many of us do every day — particularly in customer experience, leadership, and organizational design.

I work with practitioners. People responsible for improving systems, guiding teams, and navigating the real constraints of modern organizations. What I’ve observed over time is that many of the challenges we face are not technical. They are conceptual.

We optimize without stepping back.
We measure without examining assumptions.
We adopt language that shapes culture without realizing it.

Critical thinking and systems thinking are not luxuries. They are necessities.

This publication will explore the language we use, the incentives we design, the structures we inherit, and the human consequences that follow - not from reaction, but from grounded experience.

If you are someone doing the real work inside organizations — and you care about doing it thoughtfully — I hope these essays serve as a place to pause, reflect, and think more clearly.

— Karl Sharicz

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