Humanocracy Quotes

“In a survey we conducted for Harvard Business Review, 63 percent of respondents listed the reluctance of leaders to surrender power as a significant barrier to reducing bureaucracy.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“There’s no secret about what drives engagement. From Douglas McGregor’s The Human Side of Enterprise to Dan Pink’s Drive, the formula hasn’t changed in sixty years: purpose, autonomy, collegiality, and the opportunity to grow.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“Initiative, creativity, and valor can’t be commanded.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“bureaucracy … Grants excessive credence to the views of precedent-bound leaders Discourages rebellious thinking Creates long lags between sense and respond Calcifies organizational structures Blinds silo-dwelling leaders to new opportunities Suboptimizes trade-offs Frustrates the rapid redeployment of resources Discourages risk taking Politicizes decision making Creates long and tortuous approval pathways Misaligns power and leadership capability Caps opportunities for individual contribution Undermines frontline accountability Systematically devalues originality”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“An organization’s capacity for renewal should never depend on the capacity of a few senior leaders to learn and unlearn, but in a bureaucracy, it often does.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“the most important question for any organization is this: Are we changing as fast as the world around us? For most organizations, the answer is no.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“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.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“It is our bureaucracy-encrusted organizations that are slow witted, not the people inside them.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“Bureaucratic organizations are inertial, incremental, and dispiriting. In a bureaucracy, the power to initiate change is vested in a few senior leaders. When those at the top fall prey to denial, arrogance, and nostalgia, as they often do, the organization falters. That’s why deep change in a bureaucracy is usually belated and convulsive. Bureaucracies are also innovation-phobic. They are congenitally risk averse, and offer few incentives to those inclined to challenge the status quo. In a bureaucracy, being a maverick is a high-risk occupation. Worst of all, bureaucracies are soul crushing. Deprived of any real influence, employees disconnect emotionally from work. Initiative, creativity, and daring—requisites for success in the creative economy—often get left at home.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“The vanguard companies offer better-than-average wages, not because they’re unusually generous, but because their employees create exceptional value. There’s a deep conviction in these organizations that when “ordinary” employees are given the chance to learn, grow, and contribute, they’ll achieve extraordinary results.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“organizations that when “ordinary” employees are given the chance to learn, grow, and contribute, they’ll achieve extraordinary results.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“Start by redistributing a chunk of your own authority. Step back from critical decisions and let your team decide. (We’ll say more about this in chapter 15.) If your company doesn’t have a profit-sharing plan, lobby for one and make sure it’s available to every employee. In a good year, profit sharing should raise average compensation by 10 percent or more. Wherever possible, disaggregate big units into small ones. In general, keep operating units to fewer than fifty people. Give every unit a full-fledged P&L. Minimize corporate overhead allocations and avoid building targets around detailed KPIs. Expand the decision-making prerogatives of frontline operating teams. Give them responsibility for decisions around unit strategy, operations, and people. Roll back legacy policies that have truncated the freedom of frontline units. Give businesses the right to negotiate the price of centrally provided services and opt out if they don’t think they’re getting a good deal. Once every unit has a genuine P&L, significantly increase the proportion of individual or team compensation that’s at risk. Ensure that above-average performance brings above-average rewards.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“Employees who think and act like owners don’t need a lot of oversight. Accordingly, just 250 employees work at Vinci’s Paris headquarters—about 0.1 percent of total head count. Says Huillard, “It is useless having armies of auditors who just get in the way.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“The engagement deficit isn’t about what people do at work, but how they’re managed. In Gallup’s research, 70 percent of the variation in engagement scores was explained by differences in the attitudes and behaviors of the employee’s boss.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“FIGURE 3-3 Bureaucrats and bureaucratic work as a percentage of the US workforce”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“FIGURE 2-1 US employment in occupations based on importance of originality to job performance”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“Reflecting later on how her team had mobilized to right the ship, Slate said, “The greatest thing is you get it done without somebody from the top saying, ‘This is what you’re going to do.’ The idea came from the ground floor, based on a shared assessment of what we needed. We’re all responsible for the financial performance of our facility.” 5 An oft-repeated mantra at Nucor is that decisions should be “pushed down to the lowest level.” It’s no surprise, then, that the company has a miniscule corporate center—about a hundred people occupying two floors of a nondescript office building on the outskirts of Charlotte, North Carolina. Head office acts as the corporate bank, reviewing major capital requests, and also sets a few basic rules such as base salary levels and minimum performance standards for the divisions.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“As you’d expect of a company built to encourage creative problem-solving, Nucor is highly decentralized. In essence, the company is a confederation of seventy-five divisions that operate independently but compete collectively.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“Most of today’s corporations were conceived as command-and-control organizations. The founders of integrated steel mills, for example, clearly assumed that the “genius” of the organization resided almost completely in management … In contrast, we built Nucor under the assumption that most of the “genius” in our organization would be found among the people doing the work. From the outset, we shaped our business to let employees show management the way to goals that once seemed unreachable.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“Throughout the long history of social progress, the most powerful argument for change has been the assertion that every human being deserves the fullest possible opportunity to develop, apply, and benefit from their natural gifts, and that unnecessary human-made impediments to this quest are unjust. That is why we stand against bureaucracy: because human beings deserve better.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“With every crisis, authority moves to the center, and stays there. And as bureaucracy grows stronger, those who might resist it grow weaker.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“That’s the paradox of change in a bureaucracy: what seems doable isn’t transformational and what’s transformational doesn’t seem doable. The result: an endless succession of tweaks that never succeed in making the organization fundamentally more capable.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“Unfortunately, the premise that employees are incapable of exercising judgment tends to be self-validating. First, jobs stripped of interesting cognitive work are unlikely to attract individuals looking to exercise their problem-solving skills. Second, overly scripted jobs give employees little opportunity to disprove the bureaucratic hypothesis that acumen correlates with rank. And third, after living for a few months in a reign of rules, most employees will quit or mentally check out.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“How is it that in their personal lives, employees can be trusted to buy houses and cars, but at work can’t requisition a $ 300 office chair without a manager’s approval? If we thought about it for a minute, we’d realize this is stupid. Autonomy correlates with initiative and innovation. Shrink an individual’s freedom and you shrink their enthusiasm and creativity.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“Rules, no matter how enveloping, will never deliver an exceptional customer experience. Colleen Barrett, who in her forty-seven-year career at Southwest served as head of marketing, customer service, people, and operations, describes the airline’s approach to rules: “The rules are guidelines. I can’t sit in Dallas, Texas, and write a rule for every single scenario you’re going to run into. You’re out there. You’re dealing with the public. You can tell in any given situation when a rule should be bent or broken. You can tell because it’s simply the right thing to do in the situation you are facing.” 17 Backing up this freedom is a concerted effort to ensure every team member has the information needed to think and act like an owner. At Southwest, training programs cover industry economics, financial ratios, profitability drivers, and more. By investing in the judgment of its people, Southwest creates a business that is smarter, more innovative, and more profitable.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“Near the end of his tenure as co-CEO of SAP, Jim Hagemann Snabe discovered that the German software giant had amassed more than fifty thousand key performance indicators (KPIs), covering every job across the company. Snabe was horrified. “We were trying to run the company by remote control,” he recalls. “We had all this amazing talent, but had asked them to put their brains on ice.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“What’s needed are radically new organizational models that downplay formal structure. In a world of relentless change, trade-offs need to be made as close to the front lines as possible. Boundaries must be malleable. Resources, rather than being hoarded, must flow unhindered toward promising opportunities. Interunit coordination must be the product of nimble, self-organizing communities and market-like transactions rather than blanket policies or cumbersome councils.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“In a bureaucracy, every new challenge spawns a new fiefdom, usually headed by a CxO. Today, it’s not unusual for a company to have a chief compliance officer, chief digital officer, chief diversity officer, chief environmental officer, chief transformation officer, and more. Every freshly minted CxO will set up new committees, issue new policies, and demand the collection of new data. There will be more check-ins and sign-offs, more turf battles, and more cooks in the kitchen. The result: more overhead, less accountability, and ever-longer decision cycles.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“In a highly formalized organization, individuals tend to be hyperfocused on their own, unit-specific goals. Everything else is a distraction. Unfortunately, the future seldom lines up with the org chart. Parochialism not only makes new opportunities hard to spot, but hard to resource. Unit leaders often feel they have insufficient resources to deliver on their own commitments, let alone someone else’s. Share resources, and you risk missing your targets.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

“bureaucracy partitions activities into formally defined operating units, each with its own goals, team members, and budget. Where the aim of stratification is consistency, the goal of formalization is clarity. By precisely delineating roles and responsibilities, individuals know what they’re accountable for, what decisions they can make, and what resources they control. It’s hard to imagine how an institution could function without a formal organization, but perhaps we should try.”
― Gary Hamel, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them