People are the key to everything. They are the latent force and the limiting constraint. People are human, with all the problems that go along with that. What is the human potential? What is needed so that people can do the maximum that they are capable of? An increase in population should be a positive for development success rather than being a negative that reduces wealth.

Recent development thinking has people as liabilities and users of scarce resources rather than being human assets that help produce and create wealth. The chapter challenges some of the issues about people that are used to explain development failure but which are more about the way organizations and societies fail people. It raises the question about people's wasted potential, lack of opportunity and disorganized organizations. It takes up the issue of how organizations with ineffective systems and processes destroy the potential of good people to do great work.

The focus of development is about people who are both beneficiaries and the instruments of development, either individually or through some form of organization. There is a need to envision development from the perspective of the people who are failing and hopeless under the prevailing development paradigm and optimize development from that perspective.