Humanocracy

Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

By: Gary Hamel, Michele Zanini

Narrated by: Graham Halstead

Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins

Publisher's summary

In a world of unrelenting change and unprecedented challenges, we need organizations that are resilient and daring.

Unfortunately, most organizations, overburdened by bureaucracy, are sluggish and timid. In the age of upheaval, top-down power structures and rule-choked management systems are a liability. They crush creativity and stifle initiative. As leaders, employees, investors, and citizens, we deserve better. We need organizations that are bold, entrepreneurial, and as nimble as change itself. Hence this book.

In Humanocracy, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini make a passionate, data-driven argument for excising bureaucracy and replacing it with something better. Drawing on more than a decade of research and packed with practical examples, Humanocracy lays out a detailed blueprint for creating organizations that are as inspired and ingenious as the human beings inside them.

Critical building blocks include:

• Motivation: Rallying colleagues to the challenge of busting bureaucracy
• Models: Leveraging the experience of organizations that have profitably challenged the bureaucratic status quo
• Mindsets: Escaping the industrial age thinking that frustrates progress
• 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 want to build an organization that can outrun change....
If you're committed to giving every team member the chance to learn, grow, and contribute...

...then this book's for you.

Whatever your role or title, Humanocracy will show you how to launch an unstoppable movement to equip and empower everyone in your organization to be their best and to do their best. The ultimate prize: an organization that's fit for the future and fit for human beings.

©2020 Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini (P)2020 Recorded Books

Mind-blowing

The authors provided examples of successful organizations that removed bureaucracy. The book is an invitation to experiment and start hacking the outdated practices and complacency.

Life-altering insights & opportunity

Humanocracy feels like The Way forward in our post-industrial world. The case studies, mindset shifts and techniques explored are deeply exciting. The connection between human flourishing and organizational flourishing is powerful, especially in this age of AI. It seems clear that any organization which doesn’t shift their approach and insists on maintaining a top-down rules-driven bureaucracy will simply cease to thrive, and die.

Nice organizational concept but is it possible?

I suspect that few corporate leaders have the authority and incentives to sustainably implement such a program.

???

About the book:
Learn the correct pronunciation of Adidas!

About the review:
1. The Heading is marked as optional and, yet, I cannot post my review without one?!?
2. Why does my review have to be a minimum of 15 words? "Learn the correct pronunciation of Adidas!" contains very meaningful and to-the-point 6 words: what more do you need?

Actionable and Practical

Top half of biz books I’ve read. It fits the usual format where it lays out the theme and then applies use cases to demonstrate success using the theory. This book is about undoing bureaucracy in orgs and making a human centered org, thus “Humanocracy.” More engaging than many others I read and what makes this one good is how it lays out step by step exercises you can apply, to shift the way your organization functions. This one relies heavily on experimentation. It addresses tiny ways you can help combat inertia in highly bureaucratic organizations, even when you may not have a large span of control. I also like how it talks about companies that used the exercises and then their results. Again, not something you normally see in such detail, which is super helpful because it’s like having a consultant’s playbook. Easy read with quick dialogue, the occasional humor and doesn’t insult your intelligence with unicorn use cases where the CEO led change and threw millions of dollars at shifting a culture.

Secular Humanism At Work

Book Review:
6 out of 10
There are certainly useful things in this book, but they’re not the exclusive provision of the author. Those ideas that are applicable are universally recognized virtues such as compassion, honesty, courage and the willingness to think creatively.

Other than that its main message is that in order to overthrow bureaucratic organizations you must "think like an activist". That should tell you all you need to know.

Rethink your actions

The book tells in a very compelling way that managers are people as everybody else and should change to be leaders. It show how successful you can be if you allow people to do their best. It worth every minute invested on it. Let’s everybody join the mission of making companies more human and by so turning day to day work more enjoyable.

Anecdotal content and low-quality writing

I was determined to finish this book but simply couldn’t. I did not find the content remotely compelling in the nor the writing enjoyable. Here is a list of a few a of the sins of this book: 1. Using anecdotes as evidence. 2. Frequent usage of language that conveys absoluteness in interpreting complex events that clearly have multiple possible explanations. 3. Full of unnecessary jargons. 4. Overall poor writing/storytelling. The quality of the writing is that of a mediocre college application essay. There is much fluff and little clarity in chapters that aim to showcase the real-world implementation of the humanocracy philosophy. 5. Self contradictory. The book repeatedly criticizes high-salaried executives (“CXOs”) for their uselessness in organizations, until it needs to introduce some CXO who agrees with the author, when all of a sudden these characters are described with words of utmost praises. Overall, I do not recommend this book.

Few Good Thoughts

But mostly horrifically bland content. Really uneventful listen with a few thought provoking moments. Could’ve summed it up in a fraction of words.

Not Worth my time

The book is contaminated with wokeness over science.
Which is very sad, I liked the book Future of management and had hoped this was of same quality.