Will I love Humanocracy?

Most businesses today are filled with untapped creative potential. The primary barrier? Bureaucracy.

Following in the footsteps of Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations, this book takes a more academic approach, offering CEOs and MBAs rigorous case studies and practical strategies for influencing culture and reducing bureaucratic bloat. Authors Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini—also a McKinsey alum—argue that to be more innovative and adaptable, organizations need a new DNA, free from rigid structures and outdated management practices.

If crowd-sourced strategy, decentralized decision-making, and collective profit-sharing sound like a dream, this book shows how companies of all sizes are succeeding with these methods,… show more.

Humanocracy addresses perhaps the biggest opportunity for value creation at scale, i.e., transitioning large command-and-control corporations to flatter organizations.

What I like most is the combination of rigorous thinking, plain language, and company stories illustrating the worldwide movement to purge bureaucracy. I have personally studied one of the companies spotlighted, the preeminent steel manufacturer Nucor. Four layers of management from the CEO to those working in the steel plants.

The authors understand what makes Nucor excel (page 82): “True to the spirit of humanocracy, Nucor’s model isn’t about pushing employees to do more, but giving them the opportunity to be … show more.

Nobody writes better about management innovation and about the need for radically changing traditional management than Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini.

Humanocracy is loaded with amazing stories and convincing arguments, all written in an elegant and often witty way. The book is highly recommended.

This book does a very nice job highlighting the costs of traditional bureaucracy and shows that bureaucracy costs the economy trillions of dollars. The authors then review how to create an organization where people feel empowered to accomplish all that they can. By fulling engaging the hearts, minds, and actions of people, organizations are more successful over time.