These companies were built, or in some cases rebuilt, with one goal in mind—to 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.

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.

How is it that in their personal lives, employees can be trusted to buy houses and cars, but at work can’t requisition a $300 office chair without a manager’s approval? If we thought about it for a minute, we’d realize this is stupid. Autonomy correlates with initiative and innovation. Shrink an individual’s freedom and you shrink their enthusiasm and creativity.

Let us not pretend, though, that bureaucracy advances independent of human intention. The fuel that feeds the growth of bureaucracy is the quest for personal power. Power brings survival advantages, and we are wired to seek it. Having the power to direct your life is essential, but like the desire for food, alcohol, or sex, the lust for power can enslave us. That’s why philosophers and moral teachers so often warn us of its dangers.

Thus, while those who are very wealthy like to believe that they are worthy of the financial rewards they have accrued, many poorer people don’t want to mess with the dream that they too might achieve such riches if only they work hard enough. For them to concede that perhaps the system was stacked against them—that money had become far better at begetting more money than working long hard shifts—would be tantamount to abandoning their sense of agency and their cherished beliefs that what made their countries different was that anyone who worked hard enough could be whatever they wished to be.