Quotes from Gary Hamel

These higher-order capabilities are the products of passion, of a commitment to something that inspires us, something outside ourselves that needs and deserves the best of who we are. Initiative, creativity, and valor can't be commanded. They are gifts. Every employee gets to decide, "Do I bring these gifts to work today, or not?" and as the Gallup data suggests, the answer is usually "no" and, sometimes, "hell, no.

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. Unfortunately, engagement levels haven't changed much either. It seems that every generation rediscovers the essential elements of human engagement and then does nothing.

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.11 For example, employees who felt they could approach their boss with any type of question were more engaged than those who couldn't.

The word bureaucratie was coined in the early eighteenth century by Jean-Claude Marie Vincent, a French government minister. Translated as "the rule of desks," the label was not intended as a compliment. Vincent viewed France's vast administrative apparatus as a threat to the spirit of enterprise. (Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.) A century later, in 1837, the British philosopher John Stuart Mill described bureaucracy as a vast tyrannical network.

The fault lies not with any particular manager, but with a management regime that empowers the few at the expense of the many, that prizes conformance over originality, that wedges human beings into narrow roles, robs them of agency, and treats them as mere resources.

We need to put human beings, not structures, processes, or methods, at the center of our organizations. Instead of a management model that seeks to maximize control for the sake of organizational efficiency, we need one that seeks to maximize contribution for the sake of impact.

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.

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?

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?

How, exactly, do the archetypical features of bureaucracy—stratified decision rights, formalized unit boundaries, specialized roles, and standardized practices—undermine adaptability, innovation, and engagement?

It's easy to believe that large-scale human action is impossible without a top-down power structure. Unity of command ensures clarity of direction. Clear lines of authority minimize ambiguity. Tiered decision rights align power and competence. Absent formal hierarchy, there's anarchy, right? Well, maybe not.

Bringing the ATLAS detector to life required tons of leadership and creativity. What it didn't require was a pyramid. No one within the ATLAS consortium had the power to give an order. Everyone was a colleague and no one was a boss. Despite this, the ATLAS detector was completed on time and within budget.

When an organization confronts a large number of novel problems, a top-down structure is likely to be a choke point. As issues get escalated, problems pile up on the doorstep of senior leaders who often lack the experience and bandwidth to make smart, speedy decisions. Over time, the backlog grows and the pace of decision making decelerates. Stratification is the enemy of speed.

In a formal hierarchy, the power to initiate change tends to be concentrated at the top. Major pivots require a top-level sign-off. The problem is, by the time an issue is big enough to capture the CEO's scarce attention, the organization is already playing catch-up. Leaders are insulated—organizationally, culturally, and geographically—from the fringes where new trends take shape.

Henry Ford once wondered querulously, "Why is it that whenever I ask for a pair of hands, a brain comes attached?

In a hierarchical organization, the responsibility for setting strategy and direction is vested in a handful of senior executives. Those at the top are expected to be uniquely farsighted, inquisitive, and creative. In practice, this is often not the case.

While veteran leaders may have the benefit of experience, they're weighed down by legacy beliefs. Many of their assumptions about customers, technology, and the competitive environment were forged years or decades earlier, and reflect a world that no longer exists.

the single greatest threat to organizational resilience: the unwillingness or inability of senior leaders to write off their own depreciating intellectual capital. This failing would be less dangerous if subordinates felt empowered to challenge C-suite dogma, but most middle managers are disinclined to bite the hand that feeds them. Thus myopia, like authority, trickles down.

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.

In the age of upheaval, the quantities of foresight and ingenuity required to run a large organization exceed the abilities of any single human being or small team—and the bar keeps going up. Simply put, bureaucratic structures ask more of leaders than they can deliver.

The typical medium- or large-scale organization infantilizes employees, enforces dull conformity, and discourages entrepreneurship; it wedges people into narrow roles, stymies personal growth, and treats human beings as mere resources.

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.

In consequence, our organizations are often less resilient, creative, and energetic than the people inside them. The culprit is bureaucracy—with its authoritarian power structures, suffocating rules, and toxic politicking

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.