Human capital is the stock of competencies, knowledge, social and personality attributes, including creativity, embodied in the ability to perform labor so as to produce economic value.  It is an aggregate economic view of the human being acting within economies, which is an attempt to capture the social, biological, cultural and psychological complexity as they interact in explicit and/or economic transactions.  Many theories explicitly connect investment in human capital development to education, and the role of human capital in economic development, productivity growth, and innovation has frequently been cited as a justification for government subsidies for education and job skills training.

The goal of management is to align managers with the people they manage to achieve greater accountability, proximity of relevant knowledge and skills and immediacy of change, to foster employee engagement by shortening the links in the chain of command, and to enable a strategic view of resource management.