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.

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.

Zhang’s worldview is centered on the power of human agency. Like Chris Rufer at Morning Star, he believes the best organization is the one that gives human beings the maximum freedom to excel. Iverson’s worldview revolved around the idea of everyday genius. He believed that it’s employees, rather than managers, who drive a business forward. If you believe this, heart and soul, then bureaucracy isn’t something you whine about, it’s something you try to kill.

People desire and thrive on jobs that give them control over their own decisions. Since the 1980s, management literature has been filled with instructions for how to delegate more and “empower employees to empower themselves.” The thinking is exactly what we’ve heard from Paolo. The more people are given control over their own projects, the more ownership they feel, and the more motivated they are to do their best work. Telling employees what to do is so old-fashioned, it leads to screams of “micromanager!” “dictator!” and “autocrat!