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The Wall Street Journal calls London Business School professor, Gary Hamel, the world’s most influential business thinker – and his landmark books have been translated into twenty-five languages.
His brand-new book, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations As Amazing As The People Inside Them, just launched as an Amazon “Number One Release” & is the focus for this special podcast episode.
In a nutshell, “Humanocracy” thoughtfully outlines why the time has finally come for organizations to abandon their bureaucratic ways and bring humanity back into the workplace. He and his co-author Michele Zanini, assert that companies around the world are disabled by bureaucracy – and that fact is validated by declining global productivity growth and entrenched employee engagement scores.
In a bureaucracy, Hamel tells us, human beings are treated as instruments of the organization. Management empowers few people at the expense of the many, prizes conformity over originality, wedges workers into narrow roles, robs them of agencies – and inherently kills their spirit. In a ”humanocracy,” however, the organization itself becomes the instrument – and it’s the vehicle human beings use to better their lives and the lives of those they serve. 
“We must do our part to emancipate the human spirit,” the authors write. “We must start over. We need a new organizational paradigm; one that empowers and equips every employee to be an inspired problem solver and a business-savvy decision maker. We must cross-train every worker and treat them as indispensable.” And what their book proves is that the very best organizations intentionally give human beings the maximum freedom to excel.
Famous German sociologist Max Weber famously said that “bureaucracy develops more perfectly the more it succeeds in eliminating all purely personal, irrational and emotional elements which escape calculation.” In effect, his insight is that bureaucracies are designed to weaken the hearts in people – and to subvert their humanity.
What would the world be like – what would all of our lives be like – if we worked in organizations that valued people over products, that emphasized trust and transparency, and whose management models were built to maximize creativity, competency, collaboration, commitment and courage?
Listen in as Gary Hamel shares his remarkable research and vision.
