There is a moment in every organizational crisis when someone needs a villain.
This week - for Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow - that villain was HR.
"We had an HR team, and that HR team was creating problems that didn't exist," Breslow told Fortune's editorial director at the Workforce Innovation Summit. "Those problems disappeared when I let them go."
The internet responded the way the internet responds to everything - loudly, quickly, and mostly without nuance.
HR professionals rallied in defense. Critics piled on with years of accumulated frustration. Hot takes proliferated. Sides were taken.
And somewhere in the middle of all of it - the real conversation got lost.
Because here is the uncomfortable truth that nobody on either side wants to say out loud.
Ryan Breslow isn't entirely wrong.
And he isn't entirely right.
And the difference between those two things matters enormously - not just for Bolt, but for every organization navigating the question of what HR is actually for.
What He Gets Right
Breslow described a culture where people felt empowered and entitled but weren't actually working hard - a workplace oriented around complaints rather than execution and innovation.
If that description is accurate - and there's no reason to assume it isn't - then something had genuinely gone wrong at Bolt. Not necessarily because of HR. But in the organizational system HR was operating within.
Here is what I've observed across 30 years of executive HR leadership:
When HR becomes a complaint management function rather than a business performance function - it has lost its way. When HR's primary output is process, policy, and protection rather than capability, alignment, and results - organizations are right to question its value. When HR sits at the edge of strategic conversations rather than at the center of them - the function has allowed itself to become exactly what critics accuse it of being.
A bureaucratic obstacle between leadership and the work that needs to get done.
That version of HR deserves scrutiny. It has earned it.
The frustration driving the social media pile-on this week isn't manufactured. It's the accumulated experience of thousands of employees and leaders who have watched HR protect process instead of people - and protect itself instead of the organization.
That's real. And anyone who has spent serious time in this profession has seen it.
What He Gets Wrong
As HR consultant Catherine Hodds observed - positioning HR as solely responsible for cultural or performance issues is a misdiagnosis. Culture is shaped by leadership through the behaviors they role model, the decisions they make, and what they choose to prioritize, tolerate, or challenge over time.
The culture Breslow described at Bolt - entitlement, complaint orientation, low accountability - didn't arrive from HR orientation documents and policy manuals.
It was built. Slowly. Through thousands of leadership decisions, hiring choices, tolerance of certain behaviors, and reward of others.
HR may have enabled some of those dynamics. HR rarely creates them alone.
Bolt now operates with a People Ops function - more focused on efficiency over what Breslow called fluff. Which raises an obvious question.
If the problems were in HR - why does Bolt still need people operations?
The answer is that the problems were never in HR. They were in what HR had been allowed to become. And what leadership had allowed - and sometimes actively encouraged - the culture to become around it.
Eliminating the HR team didn't solve the problem. It removed the most visible symptom while the underlying disease remained.
The Real Question Nobody Is Asking
The Bolt story has generated enormous heat this week. But it has generated very little light.
Because the real question - the one worth asking in every organization right now - is not whether to have HR.
It's what HR is actually for.
I built HR C-Suite in 2011 on a premise that was not popular at the time and remains contested today.
HR's value should be measured in business outcomes - not administrative activity.
Not how many complaints got processed. Not how many policies got written. Not how many compliance boxes got checked.
But whether the organization is more capable, more competitive, and more aligned because of the work the people function did.
That means HR leaders who speak the language of business results - not just HR metrics. Who connect every workforce decision to the outcomes that determine whether the organization wins or falls behind. Who sit at the strategy table before decisions are made - not after they need to be implemented.
As Alex Currie, CPO and founder of HR consultancy Wonderland People noted - the right HR person can add intrinsic value to the business and lead shaping the culture that a CEO is trying to create.
The operative word is right.
Not every HR function deserves defending. Not every HR team has earned its seat at the table. And not every CEO who questions HR's value is wrong to do so.
But the answer to a broken HR function is not no HR function.
It's a better one.
What This Moment Is Actually About
The pile-on happening on social media this week is not really about Bolt.
It's about a profession that has spent decades in an identity crisis - caught between serving employees and serving the organization, between compliance and strategy, between protection and performance.
That crisis is real. And it won't be resolved by defending the status quo or by eliminating the function entirely.
It will be resolved when HR leaders make a choice - clearly, consistently, and publicly - about what they are actually for.
Are you in the room to protect process?
Or are you in the room to drive results?
The organizations that answer that question correctly - and build their people function accordingly - don't end up in Fortune Magazine headlines about firing their HR team.
They end up with a competitive advantage most of their peers never figure out how to build.
That's been true for 30 years.
It has never been more true than it is right now.
