a Wall Street Journal Bestseller
Viral Organizations.
Great Jobs.
Zero Bureaucracy.
From Gary Hamel, Wall Street Journal’s #1 business thinker, and noted consultant Michele Zanini, a revolutionary manifesto and practical manual for building organizations that are more daring, resilient, creative, and inspiring places to work.
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About Humanocracy
Now more than ever we need organizations that are daring, resilient, and creative.
Unfortunately, when confronted by unprecedented challenges, most companies and institutions prove timid, plodding and orthodox. The culprit is bureaucracy. With its top-down power structures and rule-choked systems, bureaucracy frustrates renewal and hobbles ingenuity. In the age of upheaval these long-tolerated disabilities are fast becoming competitively and economically untenable. Humanity needs and deserves something better.
In Humanocracy, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini make a passionate, data-driven argument for uninstalling bureaucracy and reinventing management-as-we-know-it. In this extensively updated and expanded new edition, readers will find compelling new case studies, the latest research findings, and a wealth of fresh and provocative insights.
Humanocracy is both a manifesto for institutional renewal and a practical blueprint for building organizations that are as courageous, energetic and ingenious as the people inside them.
Essential building blocks include:
Motivation:
Rallying colleagues to the challenge of reimagining management-as-usual
Models:
Leveraging the experience of vanguard organizations that have successfully challenged the bureaucratic status quo
Mindsets:
Escaping the industrial-age thinking that undermines the quest to build radically more capable organizations
Mobilization:
Activating a pro-change coalition to hack outmoded management systems and processes
Migration:
Embedding the principles of humanocracy—ownership, markets, meritocracy, community, openness, experimentation, and paradox—in your organization's DNA
If you've finally run out of patience with bureaucratic bullshit; if you’re eager to build an organization that can outrun change and outperform expectations; if you believe every team member deserves the chance to do something extraordinary; and you’re unwilling to wait for someone else to step up and lead
…then this book’s for you.
Whatever your role or title, Humanocracy will show you how to launch an unstoppable movement to build an organization that’s fit for the future and fit for human beings.
Meet the authors
Gary Hamel
Gary Hamel is on the faculty of the London Business School and is a cofounder of the Management Lab, an organization that builds technology and tools to support breakthrough management innovation. Hailed by the Wall Street Journal as the world's most influential business thinker, his landmark books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages. They include The Future of Management and What Matters Now. Hamel lives in Silicon Valley.
Michele Zanini
Michele Zanini is a cofounder of the Management Lab, where he helps forward-thinking companies become fundamentally more entrepreneurial and innovative. An alumnus of McKinsey & Company and the RAND Corporation, Zanini holds degrees from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and the RAND School of Public Policy. Zanini calls Boston home.
Praise for
humanocracy
A Wall Street Journal Bestseller
Named one of "The 10 Best Business Books of 2021" by Forbes
Named one of the "Best books of 2020: Critics' Picks" by the Financial Times
Named one of the "Best Business Books 2020: Strategy" by strategy+business
"…Messrs Hamel and Zanini may be onto something… Unleash [people’s] creativity, and productivity will improve, job satisfaction will increase and workers in supposedly ‘low-skilled’ jobs will be free to demonstrate their abilities. If so, the future of work needn't be gloomy after all."
The Economist
"Anyone trying to reinvent a "legacy" business should read Humanocracy… Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini set out a practical view on how to address the transformation challenges many companies are dealing with. Humanocracy highlights a lesson that has never been more important: businesses are all about people, and the more human we make them, the better."
Ana Botín Executive Chairman, Santander
"Rarely has the case for dismantling bureaucracy been made as effectively, passionately, and comprehensively. The time to start is now, and the book to read is Humanocracy. Essential to revitalizing our organizations and reinvigorating our economies."
Bengt Holmstrom Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; 2016 Nobel laureate in Economics
"Humanocracy provides the reader with a road map to helping organizations unleash creativity, energy, and resiliency through leveraging the core of every organization—humans."
Gen. Stanley McChrystal US Army, Ret.; New York Times bestselling author, Team of Teams
"Humanocracy is the most important management book I have read in a very long time. This is not just another book about the power of purpose or the joys of empowerment. Rather, it's a detailed, well-researched, data-driven, compellingly argued expose on the massive costs of bureaucracy in society. Hamel and Zanini offer an equally compelling argument for why it doesn't have to be this way, complete with a practical guide for creating organizations that really work."
Amy Edmondson professor, Harvard Business School; Author, The Fearless Organization
"Humanocracy makes the case for replacing chain of command with chain of trust and radical transparency. It's a prescription for unlocking game-changing innovation and the value of every individual."
Marc Benioff Founder, Chairman, and Co-CEO, Salesforce New York Times bestselling author, Trailblazer