As the change in sentiment starts to bite, and governments become more aggressive in challenging monopoly power, CEOs will need to find new routes to profitability and growth. Their best bet: committing wholeheartedly to creating organizations that allow human beings to do their best work, unfettered by the shackles of bureaucracy.

If our organizations are inhuman, it’s because we designed them to be so—whether consciously or not. Every institution is an assemblage of choices about how best to organize human beings in light of some particular goal. The premise of this book is that most of these choices can and must be revisited.

We must be no less radical in rethinking the foundations of human organizations. Like our forebears, we must do our part to emancipate the human spirit. It is here we find a cause worth serving—to build organizations that give every human being the opportunity to thrive.

Our organizations are less than fully human because they were designed to be so. Writing in the early twentieth century, Max Weber, the pioneering German sociologist wrote: “[B]ureaucracy develops more perfectly the more it is ‘dehumanized,’ the more it succeeds in eliminating all purely personal, irrational and emotional elements which escape calculation.” Then as now, the goal of bureaucracy was to turn human beings into semi-programmable robots.

In every respect, Ballarin’s approach to responsibilization met the critical tests that face any attempt to upend the bureaucratic status quo:

1. It was anchored in timeless human values

1. It provided ample space for improvisation

1. It routed around points of resistance

1. It invited, rather than demanded, leaders to reimagine their roles

1. It minimized risk and disruption

For all these reasons, responsibilization gained enough runway to reach takeoff speed.

Like Michelin, every company must chart its own path to humanocracy. Nonetheless, it’s reassuring to know that you don’t need a legion of consultants, or a massive corporate change program, to get started. In fact, as we’ll see, those may be the last things you need.