Humanocracy, Revised and Updated: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

A powerful new edition of the Wall Street Journal bestseller that helps leaders build radically more human--and capable--organizations.

Now more than ever, we need organizations that are daring, resilient, and creative. Unfortunately, when confronted by unprecedented challenges, most companies and institutions prove to be timid, plodding, and orthodox. The culprit is bureaucracy. With its top-down power structures and rule-choked systems, bureaucracy hobbles ingenuity and innovation. In a time of upheaval, these long-tolerated impediments 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 edition, readers will find new and compelling case studies, the latest research findings, and a wealth of fresh and provocative insights.

Humanocracy is both a manifesto for institutional renewal and a 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 disrupted 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, then this book’s for you.

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. Professor Hamel has been hailed by the Wall Street Journal as the world’s most influential business thinker, and his landmark books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages. They include The Future of Management and What Matters Now.

Michele Zanini is a cofounder of the Management Lab, where he helps large organizations become more adaptable, innovative, and engaging places to work. Zanini is an alumnus of McKinsey & Company and the RAND Corporation and holds degrees from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and the Pardee RAND Graduate School.