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.
Related Quotes
These companies were built, or in some cases rebuilt, with one goal in mindāto 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 servingāto build organizations that give every human being the opportunity to thrive.
While most CEOs acknowledge the virtues of free markets, the companies they run are typically structured like command economies. As in the former Soviet Union, decision-making power is highly concentrated at the top. Changing this is essential to making our organizations more resilient, innovative, and human. To see how this might be done, we need to understand the conditions under which markets outperform hierarchies and then try to imagine how these advantages might be replicated within our organizations.
Bureaucracy, as weāve noted, is a game. It pits contestants against one another in a battle for positional power and the rewards that come with it. We have no problem with competitionāunless winning comes at the cost of oneās humanity. Bureaucracy will start to crumble when talented and principled people walk off the playing field; when big-hearted heretics decide to forgo bureaucratic wins for the sake of their own integrity, and for the sake of those whoāve been diminished by bureaucracy. As Harvard professor Marshall Ganz notes, the goal of people who change the world is ānot winning the game, but changing the rules.
Even when an organization is led by a pioneering CEO like Jan Wallander or Zhang Ruimin, crafting a new management model is more about ādiscover and testā than āengineer and impose.