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.

However daunting, even the most entrenched problems yield to courage and tenacity. We must not flinch or look away. Instead, we must confront what we have long known —our organizations are incapacitated by their inhumanity.

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.

If your worldview places a premium on human freedom and growth, you’ll 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, you’ll make excuses for bureaucracy and be content with minor reforms.