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.

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.

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.

For now, let’s be clear on one thing: bureaucracy must die. We can no longer afford its pernicious side effects. As humankind’s most deeply entrenched social technology, it will be hard to uproot, but that’s OK. You were put on this earth to do something significant, heroic even, and what could be more heroic than creating, at long last, organizations that are fully human?