Humanocracy: Creatiing Organizatuions as Amazing as the People Inside Them
Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini
Harvard Business Review Press (August 2020)
How to build an organization “that’s fit for human beings, and fit for the future”
In recent years, several disruptive technologies have posed major challenges that involve unique perils as well as intriguing opportunities. These technologies include artificial intelligence (AI); sensors and the Internet of Things (IOT); autonomous Machines — robots, cobots, drones, and self-driving vehicles; distributed leaders and blockchains; virtual, augmented, and mixed reality; and, connecting everything and everyone: 5G networks and satellite constellations. All have had high impact on how and where tasks are completed.
Thirty-six years ago in his classic work Future Shock, Alvin Toffler makes this assertion: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini may have had that assertion in mind when explaining, “One of our primary goals in this book is to lay out a blueprint for turning every job into a good job. Rather than deskilling work, we need to upskill employees…While there nay be a finite number of routine jobs to be performed in the world, there’s no limit on the number of worthwhile problems that are begging to be solved. Viewed from this vantage point, the threat that automation poses for employment depends mostly on whether or not we continue to treat employees like robots.”
Those who supervise workers must also be willing and able to “learn, unlearn, and relearn” insofar as a workplace is concerned. Only then can they free themselves from what James O’Toole so aptly characterizes (in Leading Change) as “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom.”
These are among the passages of greatest interest and value to me, also listed to indicate the scope of Hamel and Zanini’s coverage:
o Fully Human (Pages 3-21)
o Humans Are Creative; Most Organizations Are Not (11-14)
o Humans Are Passionate; Most Organizations Are Not (14-16)
o Stratified and Myopic Bureaucrats (23-41 and 50-55)
o Haier: Everyone an Entrepreneur (85-102)
o Principles over Practices (105-110 and 271-272)
o “Top to Bottom Ownership”: Haier, Nucor, Svenska Handelsbanken, and Vinci, (119-123)
o Getting Started (123-224)
o Collective Intelligence (126-128)
o Dynamic Coordination, and, Competitive Discipline (131-137)
o Four Competences, and, Decontaminating Judgments about Merit (140-149)
o The Power of Community (157-175)
o The Power of Openness (177-198)
o Closed Strategy, and, Open Strategy (187-19i)
o The Power of Experimentation (199-210)
o The Power of Paradox (211-233)
o Table 13-3: Bureaucracy versus humanocracy (233)
o Michelin (237-255)
o Detox for Bureaucrats (258-261)
o Hacking Management (265-270)
Hamel and Zanini offer a new organizational paradigm, “one in which human beings are no longer viewed as ‘resources’ or ‘capital.’ We must also reframe the problem — the goal is to maximize contribution, not compliance. And we need to embed new human-centric principles in every structure, system, process, and practice. If we’re serious about creating organizations that are fit for human beings and fit for the future, nothing less will do.”
More specifically, Hamel and Zanini envision organizations within which workers (at all levels and in all areas) make these affirmations:
“My work is my passion.
I get to make meaningful business decisions.
I feel directly accountable to customers.
My team is small and super flexible.
The success of this business depends critically on me.
I measure progress in days and weeks, not months and quarters.
Every day I have the chance to solve new, interesting problems.
I have a significant financial stake in the success of this business.”
These affirmations are listed on Page 113 and implicit (if not explicit) throughout the narrative.
Hamel and Zanini also cite a study conducted by Dirk von Dierendonck and Inge Nuijten in 2011. The results serve as a foundation for an eight-factor model of servant leadership, a concept introduced in an essay by Robert Greenleaf in 1970. The key factors are empowerment, accountability, selflessness, humility, authenticity, courage, forgiveness, and stewardship. Whatever an organization’s size and nature may be, its leaders can be guided and informed by this model of a humanocracy.
I agree with Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini that many (if not most) organization throughout the world are “disabled by bureaucracy — they are inertial, incremental, and inhuman. This is a problem not just for CEOs, but for all of us.” This book is both a manifesto for organizational transformation and an operations manual for ensuring that it continues to nurture, elicit, and honor the best of every one of its stakeholders.