The typical medium- or large-scale organization infantilizes employees, enforces dull conformity, and discourages entrepreneurship; it wedges people into narrow roles, stymies personal growth, and treats human beings as mere resources.
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As you read, youâll realize that these Nine Lies have taken hold because each satisfies the organizationâs need for control. Large organizations are complex places, and a strong and understandable instinct of their leaders is to seek simplicity and orderânot least because this makes it easier to persuade themselves and their stakeholders that they are moving toward their objectives. But the desire for simplicity easily shades into a desire for conformity, and before long this conformity threatens to extinguish individuality. Before we know it, the particular talents and interests of each person are seen as inconveniences, and the organization comes to treat its people as essentially interchangeable.
These companies were built, or in some cases rebuilt, with one goal in mindâto maximize human contribution. This aspiration is the animating spirit of humanocracy, and stands in stark contrast to the bureaucratic obsession with control. Both goals are important, but in most organizations, the effort spent on ensuring conformance is a vast multiple of the energy devoted to enlarging the capacity for human impact. This gross imbalance is dangerous for organizations, a drag on the economy, and ethically troubling.
If your worldview places a premium on human freedom and growth, youâll regard the inhumanity of bureaucracy as intolerable and feel compelled to act. If, on the other hand, you regard human beings as factors of production, youâll make excuses for bureaucracy and be content with minor reforms.
In short, the average employee is drowning in complexity. And the outstanding employee, the one who has a chance of keeping up, is a much scarcer resource than many managers are willing to acknowledge. We're designing jobs for superhumans, and it turns out our people are flesh and blood.
In short, the average employee is drowning in complexity. And the outstanding employee, the one who has a chance of keeping up, is a much scarcer resource than many managers are willing to acknowledge. We're designing jobs for superhumans, and it turns out our people are flesh and blood.