AmCham + HBR Press: HUMANOCRACY - Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

Now more than ever we need organizations that are resilient, daring, and inspiring. Unfortunately, the typical organization, overburdened by bureaucracy, is inert, timid, and dispiriting.  We can and must do better.

In HUMANOCRACY: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them (June 9, Harvard Business Review Press), world-renowned business thinker Gary Hamel and management expert Michele Zanini make a passionate, data-driven argument for uprooting bureaucracy and unleashing the human spirit at work. Drawing on more than a decade of research, and packed with practical examples, HUMANOCRACY lays out a detailed blueprint for creating organizations that are as inspired and ingenious as the human beings inside them.

Critical building blocks include:

• Motivation: Rallying colleagues to the challenge of busting bureaucracy
• Models: Leveraging the experience of organizations that have profitably challenged the bureaucratic status quo
• Mindsets: Escaping the industrial age thinking that frustrates progress
• Mobilization: Activating a pro-change coalition to hack outmoded management systems and processes
• Migration: Embedding the principles of humanocracy—ownership, experimentation, meritocracy, markets, openness, community and paradox—in your organization’s DNA.

HUMANOCRACY is for every rebel who’s run out of patience with bureaucratic bullshit, believes every team member should have the chance to learn, grow and contribute, and is ready to do their part to hack management.

It’s an imperative not only for individual organizations, for the global economy as well. The authors estimate that the move to humanocracy would add $3.4 trillion to U.S. economic output, and $10 trillion across the OECD. It would also unleash a flood of dammed-up innovation. Most importantly, it would raise the emotional and financial returns on work for every employee.

Resilient organizations, great jobs, and zero bureaucracy—that’s the promise of humanocracy, but more than a promise, it’s a reality we can start building today.