This shift from autocracy to democracy didn’t occur spontaneously, nor was it led from the top. Instead, it was the work of a sprawling confederation of philosophers, protesters, and patriots who were inspired by the promise of self-government.

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.

Aristotle argued that an individual cannot achieve happiness without self-direction. If we believe that a just society is one in which people have the opportunity and freedom to become their best selves, then we shouldn’t tolerate the soft tyranny that millions of employees face each day at work—what oral historian Studs Terkel called “a Monday through Friday kind of dying.

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.

Before moving on, let’s recap:

• Bureaucracies are replication machines. They’re designed for exploit, not explore.

• Bureaucracies tend to be monocultures. They’re run by individuals temperamentally inclined to favor the status quo.

• Bureaucratic information systems fail to capture the hidden costs of one-sided trade-offs. As a result, many decisions are underinformed and, therefore, suboptimal.

• Bureaucracies tend to enforce uniform trade-offs across the entire organization. Though unsophisticated, this preserves the center’s power and sense of order.

• The bureaucratic aversion to ambiguity leads to either/or thinking. Rather than maintaining a creative tension, organizations tend to whipsaw between counterposed priorities.