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.

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.

In a bureaucracy, human beings are instruments, employed by an organization to create products and services. In a humanocracy, the organization is the instrument—it’s the vehicle human beings use to better their lives and the lives of those they serve. (See figure 1-2.) The question at the core of bureaucracy is, “How do we get human beings to better serve the organization?” The question at the heart of humanocracy is, “What sort of organization elicits and merits the best that human beings can give?” As we’ll see, the implications of this shift in perspective are profound.

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?

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.