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Humanocracy (Updated & Expanded): Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them
Now more than ever, we need organizations that are daring, resilient, and creative.
Unfortunately, when confronted by unprecedented challenges, most companies and institutions prove to be timid, plodding, and orthodox. The culprit is bureaucracy. With its top-down power structures and rule-choked systems, bureaucracy hobbles ingenuity and innovation. In a time of upheaval, these long-tolerated impediments are fast becoming competitively and economically untenable. Humanity needs and deserves something better.
In Humanocracy, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini make a passionate, data-driven argument for uninstalling bureaucracy and reinventing management as we know it. In this extensively updated and expanded edition, listeners will find new and compelling case studies, the latest research findings, and a wealth of fresh and provocative insights.
Humanocracy is both a manifesto for institutional renewal and a blueprint for building organizations that are as courageous, energetic, and ingenious as the people inside them. Essential building blocks
Rallying colleagues to the challenge of reimagining management as usual Leveraging the experience of vanguard organizations that have successfully disrupted the bureaucratic status quo Escaping the industrial-age thinking that undermines the quest to build radically more capable organizations Activating a pro-change coalition to hack outmoded management systems and processes Embedding the principles of humanocracy—ownership, markets, meritocracy, community, openness, experimentation, and paradox—in your organization's DNA If you've finally run out of patience with bureaucratic bullshit; if you're eager to build an organization that can outrun change and outperform expectations; if you believe every team member deserves the chance to do something extraordinary, then this book's for you.
Unfortunately, when confronted by unprecedented challenges, most companies and institutions prove to be timid, plodding, and orthodox. The culprit is bureaucracy. With its top-down power structures and rule-choked systems, bureaucracy hobbles ingenuity and innovation. In a time of upheaval, these long-tolerated impediments are fast becoming competitively and economically untenable. Humanity needs and deserves something better.
In Humanocracy, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini make a passionate, data-driven argument for uninstalling bureaucracy and reinventing management as we know it. In this extensively updated and expanded edition, listeners will find new and compelling case studies, the latest research findings, and a wealth of fresh and provocative insights.
Humanocracy is both a manifesto for institutional renewal and a blueprint for building organizations that are as courageous, energetic, and ingenious as the people inside them. Essential building blocks
Rallying colleagues to the challenge of reimagining management as usual Leveraging the experience of vanguard organizations that have successfully disrupted the bureaucratic status quo Escaping the industrial-age thinking that undermines the quest to build radically more capable organizations Activating a pro-change coalition to hack outmoded management systems and processes Embedding the principles of humanocracy—ownership, markets, meritocracy, community, openness, experimentation, and paradox—in your organization's DNA If you've finally run out of patience with bureaucratic bullshit; if you're eager to build an organization that can outrun change and outperform expectations; if you believe every team member deserves the chance to do something extraordinary, then this book's for you.
Audible Audio
Published October 14, 2025
About the author
Gary Hamel
58 books176 followersDr. Gary P. Hamel is an American management expert. He is a founder of Strategos, an international management consulting firm based in Chicago.
Gary Hamel is Professor of Strategic Management at London Business School. He has researched strategy development in a multinational context.
Gary Hamel is Professor of Strategic Management at London Business School. He has researched strategy development in a multinational context.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 27, 2026
Takeaways from reading the book:
Barnes & Noble, a book seller
https://www.calameo.com/read/00350737...
Buurtzorg
https://www.calameo.com/read/00350737...
Gore
https://www.calameo.com/read/00350737...
Haier, a home appliance and consumer electronics maker
https://www.calameo.com/read/00350737...
IBM
Page 220: On a crowdfunding platform, each of the company's 20,000 IT employees was given up to USD 2,000 to invest. Once an idea reached USD 25,000 in funding, it moved forward as a project.
Intuit
- Page 325: Teams from across Intuit regularly visit customers in their homes or offices to observe how they interact with Intuit's products.
- Page 326: Innovators at Intuit have multiple sources of experimental capital. Examples: 1. Each department has an experimentation budget. 2. People, who would like to experiment, can also compete for funds in periodic innovation challenges and hackathons. 3. Innovators can seek support from the CEO fund.
- Page 326: In 2012, Intuit's IT department cut the time it took to set up an online test from 2 months to two hours.
Morning Star, a tomato processor
https://www.calameo.com/read/00350737...
Netflix
- Page 244: Netflix founder Reed Hastings: The higher you get in an organization, the less feedback you receive, and the more likely you are to make another error that is obvious to anyone but you.
- Page 245: When Netflix managers want to propose a significant change, they write a memo and invite dozens of colleagues to provide input through online comments. In some cases, people are asked to rate the idea from -10 to +10, with explanations for their rating.
Nucor, a steel producer
https://www.calameo.com/read/00350737...
Roche
- Page 372: At Genentech, Bill Anderson insisted that the people best placed to make decisions are those closest to customers. Earlier, bottlenecks were created because everyone waited for top managers to make decisions.
- Page 372: At Genentech, people used to be more focused on minimizing risk than on creating impact. A leader expressed it like this, "We worked hard 100% of the time to avoid a 1% miss." What changed this thinking was when the belief "Patients matter deeply, so do not screw up" was changed to "Patients matter deeply, and they cannot wait." That made progress more important than perfection.
- Page 375: At Genentech, allocating budgets used to be like a food fight. Everyone grapped budget dollars to advance their individual interests. That changed in 2019 when Genentech started working more purpose oriented - shifting resources to where they mattered most. Transparent communication was prioritised as a key principle.
- Page 377: Jean-François Brochard, leader of Roche Pharma in France, came to the conclusion that the many weeks devoted each year to setting performance targets was not creating any value.
- Page 386: People, who work for Roche, report to customers - not to managers.
Vinci
https://www.calameo.com/read/00350737...
Other business examples
- Page 319: The success of Amazon is a function of how many experiments that people, who work for the company, do per year, per month, per week, per day. Greg Linden, who developed Amazon's personalized suggestions feature, through which 35% of Amazon's retail sales are generated, says this, "Everyone must be able to experiment, learn and iterate. Position, obedience and tradition should hold no power. For innovation to flourish, measurement must rule."
- Page 206: KKR portfolio companies in the USA, Europe and Asia have awarded billions of dollars in equity to over 60,000 nonmanagement employees across more than 40 portfolio companies.
- Page 320: It took Apple four years and countless experiments to perfect the technology behind the touch-sensitive screen.
- Page 327: People, who work for Toyota, contribute more than a million improvement suggestions each year - including reports on experiments that have produced results.
- Page 421: At Michelin, more freedom and accountability were given to people and teams. People and teams, who volunteered to try self-management, took over, for example, shift scheduling and production planning - tasks that were previously handled by supervisors and planners. Later, teams shared their experiences with each other.
What effects does technology have on work?
- Page 33: Between 2003 and 2023, global spending on information technology increased from USD 2.6 trillion to USD 3.8 trillion.
- Page 120: Collaborative technologies like Slack, Zoom and Microsoft Teams have done little to reduce management layers or expand decision making rights to people who have direct contact with users / clients. Rather than replace top-down structures, technology is more likely to enforce them.
- Page 120: Digital technology allows jobs to be sliced into ever-smaller segments and outsourced to the lowest bidder.
- Page 120: Real-time analytics make it possible to assess job performance minute by minute.
- Page 249: On social media, people follow who they want. In other words, power flows to those who are adding value.
Principles that drive entrepreneurial behaviour and engagement
- Page 74: Purpose.
- Pages 74 and 195: Freedom.
- Page 74: Collegiality.
- Page 74: The opportunity to make a difference.
- Page 195: Getting more pay.
- Page 329: Experimentation. In this regard, think of nature: Nature just tries stuff. Nature is eternally restless. It does not sit still. It does not wait for a catastrophe. It does not ask for permission. It does not plan.
- Page 420: Go sideways. When you have an idea, find one or more associates who want to help you test the idea. Why talk to associates instead of managers about your idea? Because many managers, especially managers in a bureaucracy, will say no to the idea.
Questions and tips for leaders
- Page 108: Love people. Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous, boastful, proud or rude. Love does not demand its own way. Love is not irritable and keeps no record of wrongs. Love never gives up, never loses faith. Love is always hopeful and endures through every difficulty.
- Page 211: Let people take more decisions themselves.
- Page 211: Create profit-sharing for every person, who works for the company.
- Page 211: Keep units under 50 people.
- Page 211: Have every unit create their own income statement.
- Page 211: Educate everyone about business sciences.
- Page 211: Ensure that above-average performance brings above-average rewards.
- Page 313: When people share an idea in an online suggestion box, they want to know this: Who is going to review my idea? When? Against what criteria? If the idea has merit, how will it get resourced? How much time will I get to work on the idea?
- Page 399: Management guru Mary Parker Follett explained that leadership is not defined by the exercise of power but by the capacity to increase the sense of power among those led. It is about the selfless desire to help others accomplish more than they would have thought possible.
- Page 400: Questions that managers can ask people, "What am I doing that that adds no value?" "What am I doing that you could do better?"
Characteristics of bureaucracies
- Page 30: People, who receive grants from agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, spend nearly half their time on administrative tasks. This consumes millions of researcher days.
- Page 35: The combined revenue of the world’s 500 largest companies accounts for 40% of global GDP.
- Page 36: Earlier, large companies were more productive than small companies. Today, large companies are a drag on the economy. Since 2000, the contribution of America’s leading companies to overall productivity growth has declined by 40%.
- Page 45: In the 1960s and 1970s, the difference between CEO pay in America' largest 350 companies and the pay that an average worker earns was less than 30:1. Since 1998, this ratio has increased to more than 300:1.
- Page 86: The average S&P 1500 firm CEO is 58 years old, up three years since 2003.
- Page 99: Frederick Taylor's goal was to make people as reliable and efficient as machines they served.
- Page 99: Taylorism created distinction between workers and managers. Managers became responsible for setting schedules, selecting tools, defining methods, and punishing people who did not follow rules.
- Page 100: Once, the company SAP had more than 5,000 key performance indicators.
- Page 111: Between 2003 and 2021, administrative roles at Yale increased from 151 to 964 people.
- Page 123: In companies with more than 5,000 employees, there are 8 management levels or more. 2/3 of nonmanagers say that they have little or only moderate control over their work methods and job priorities. 8 out of 10 nonmanagers say that their ideas are met with indifference, skepticism or resistance.
- Page 190: Decades of consolidation, along with the winner-take-all dynamics of digital technology, have left us with an economy that is dominated by powerful, politically connected oligopolies.
- Page 120: In most organizations, a single "no" from the person's manager can kill his or her idea. In a bureaucracy, there is only one place to sell an idea: Up the chain of command. This stands in stark contrast to Silicon Valley in California, where it is not unusual to get turned down more than 10 times before finding a willing backer to an idea.
- Page 248: A single, formal hierarchy causes problems, for example because managers feel qualified to want to decide on issues where they lack competence.
- Page 268: In a bureaucracy, censorious managers often prevent people from asking quetions or admitting mistakes.
- Page 341: Bureaucracies are designed to exploit, not to explore.
- Page 341: Bureaucracies are managed by people who favor the status quo.
Questions to determine the level of bureaucracy
- Page 125: How many management levels are there in the organization?
- Page 125: What percentage of your time do you spend on preparing reports, securing sign-offs, complying with staff requests, and participating in review meetings?
- Page 125: How much does bureaucracy slow decision-making and action in the organization?
- Page 125: To what extent are your interactions with your manager and other leaders focused on internal issues such as resolving disputes, securing resources and/or getting approvals?
- Page 125: How much freedom do frontline teams have to design their work, solve problems, and test ideas.
- Page 125: How often are frontline team members involved in the design and development of change initiatives?
- Page 125: How do people in the organization react to unconventional ideas?
- Page 125: How easy is it for an employee to launch a new project that requires a small team and a bit of seed funding?
- Page 125: How common are political behaviours in the organization?
- Page 125: How often do political skills, as opposed to demonstrated competence, influence who gets ahead in the organization?
Other research from the book
- Page 232: Break administrative functions into smaller units and make them compete with outside providers.
- Page 235: The more confident someone appears, the more likely we are to believe that they are genuinely capable, whether or not that is true. Overconfident individuals are perceived as more competent than others. Higher levels of narcissism are associated with faster promotion to the CEO role.
- Pages 237-239: Human beings are in-group biased. We rate most highly those people, who are most like us. Doing that we divide the world into "us" versus "them". Examples: 1. Native-born vs. immigrant. 2. Conservative vs. liberal. 3. Believer vs. non-believer. 4. Attractive vs. plain. Favoritism is ineffective and produces poor quality.
- Page 337: Strategy dilemmas: 1. Profitability vs. growth. 2. Scale vs. flexibility. 3. Short term vs. long term. 4. Execution vs. Innovation. 5. Discipline vs. creativity. 6. Diligence vs. speed. 7. Prudence vs. risk-taking. 8. Centralization vs. decentralization. 9. Compliance / control vs. autonomy / freedom. 10. Size vs. agility. 11. Exploit vs. explore.
- Page 437: Competence in the leadership tasks that really matter - spotting opportunities, energizing colleagues, challenging vested interests, reimagining business models, and nurturing others - does not correlate with hierarchy.
Barnes & Noble, a book seller
https://www.calameo.com/read/00350737...
Buurtzorg
https://www.calameo.com/read/00350737...
Gore
https://www.calameo.com/read/00350737...
Haier, a home appliance and consumer electronics maker
https://www.calameo.com/read/00350737...
IBM
Page 220: On a crowdfunding platform, each of the company's 20,000 IT employees was given up to USD 2,000 to invest. Once an idea reached USD 25,000 in funding, it moved forward as a project.
Intuit
- Page 325: Teams from across Intuit regularly visit customers in their homes or offices to observe how they interact with Intuit's products.
- Page 326: Innovators at Intuit have multiple sources of experimental capital. Examples: 1. Each department has an experimentation budget. 2. People, who would like to experiment, can also compete for funds in periodic innovation challenges and hackathons. 3. Innovators can seek support from the CEO fund.
- Page 326: In 2012, Intuit's IT department cut the time it took to set up an online test from 2 months to two hours.
Morning Star, a tomato processor
https://www.calameo.com/read/00350737...
Netflix
- Page 244: Netflix founder Reed Hastings: The higher you get in an organization, the less feedback you receive, and the more likely you are to make another error that is obvious to anyone but you.
- Page 245: When Netflix managers want to propose a significant change, they write a memo and invite dozens of colleagues to provide input through online comments. In some cases, people are asked to rate the idea from -10 to +10, with explanations for their rating.
Nucor, a steel producer
https://www.calameo.com/read/00350737...
Roche
- Page 372: At Genentech, Bill Anderson insisted that the people best placed to make decisions are those closest to customers. Earlier, bottlenecks were created because everyone waited for top managers to make decisions.
- Page 372: At Genentech, people used to be more focused on minimizing risk than on creating impact. A leader expressed it like this, "We worked hard 100% of the time to avoid a 1% miss." What changed this thinking was when the belief "Patients matter deeply, so do not screw up" was changed to "Patients matter deeply, and they cannot wait." That made progress more important than perfection.
- Page 375: At Genentech, allocating budgets used to be like a food fight. Everyone grapped budget dollars to advance their individual interests. That changed in 2019 when Genentech started working more purpose oriented - shifting resources to where they mattered most. Transparent communication was prioritised as a key principle.
- Page 377: Jean-François Brochard, leader of Roche Pharma in France, came to the conclusion that the many weeks devoted each year to setting performance targets was not creating any value.
- Page 386: People, who work for Roche, report to customers - not to managers.
Vinci
https://www.calameo.com/read/00350737...
Other business examples
- Page 319: The success of Amazon is a function of how many experiments that people, who work for the company, do per year, per month, per week, per day. Greg Linden, who developed Amazon's personalized suggestions feature, through which 35% of Amazon's retail sales are generated, says this, "Everyone must be able to experiment, learn and iterate. Position, obedience and tradition should hold no power. For innovation to flourish, measurement must rule."
- Page 206: KKR portfolio companies in the USA, Europe and Asia have awarded billions of dollars in equity to over 60,000 nonmanagement employees across more than 40 portfolio companies.
- Page 320: It took Apple four years and countless experiments to perfect the technology behind the touch-sensitive screen.
- Page 327: People, who work for Toyota, contribute more than a million improvement suggestions each year - including reports on experiments that have produced results.
- Page 421: At Michelin, more freedom and accountability were given to people and teams. People and teams, who volunteered to try self-management, took over, for example, shift scheduling and production planning - tasks that were previously handled by supervisors and planners. Later, teams shared their experiences with each other.
What effects does technology have on work?
- Page 33: Between 2003 and 2023, global spending on information technology increased from USD 2.6 trillion to USD 3.8 trillion.
- Page 120: Collaborative technologies like Slack, Zoom and Microsoft Teams have done little to reduce management layers or expand decision making rights to people who have direct contact with users / clients. Rather than replace top-down structures, technology is more likely to enforce them.
- Page 120: Digital technology allows jobs to be sliced into ever-smaller segments and outsourced to the lowest bidder.
- Page 120: Real-time analytics make it possible to assess job performance minute by minute.
- Page 249: On social media, people follow who they want. In other words, power flows to those who are adding value.
Principles that drive entrepreneurial behaviour and engagement
- Page 74: Purpose.
- Pages 74 and 195: Freedom.
- Page 74: Collegiality.
- Page 74: The opportunity to make a difference.
- Page 195: Getting more pay.
- Page 329: Experimentation. In this regard, think of nature: Nature just tries stuff. Nature is eternally restless. It does not sit still. It does not wait for a catastrophe. It does not ask for permission. It does not plan.
- Page 420: Go sideways. When you have an idea, find one or more associates who want to help you test the idea. Why talk to associates instead of managers about your idea? Because many managers, especially managers in a bureaucracy, will say no to the idea.
Questions and tips for leaders
- Page 108: Love people. Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous, boastful, proud or rude. Love does not demand its own way. Love is not irritable and keeps no record of wrongs. Love never gives up, never loses faith. Love is always hopeful and endures through every difficulty.
- Page 211: Let people take more decisions themselves.
- Page 211: Create profit-sharing for every person, who works for the company.
- Page 211: Keep units under 50 people.
- Page 211: Have every unit create their own income statement.
- Page 211: Educate everyone about business sciences.
- Page 211: Ensure that above-average performance brings above-average rewards.
- Page 313: When people share an idea in an online suggestion box, they want to know this: Who is going to review my idea? When? Against what criteria? If the idea has merit, how will it get resourced? How much time will I get to work on the idea?
- Page 399: Management guru Mary Parker Follett explained that leadership is not defined by the exercise of power but by the capacity to increase the sense of power among those led. It is about the selfless desire to help others accomplish more than they would have thought possible.
- Page 400: Questions that managers can ask people, "What am I doing that that adds no value?" "What am I doing that you could do better?"
Characteristics of bureaucracies
- Page 30: People, who receive grants from agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, spend nearly half their time on administrative tasks. This consumes millions of researcher days.
- Page 35: The combined revenue of the world’s 500 largest companies accounts for 40% of global GDP.
- Page 36: Earlier, large companies were more productive than small companies. Today, large companies are a drag on the economy. Since 2000, the contribution of America’s leading companies to overall productivity growth has declined by 40%.
- Page 45: In the 1960s and 1970s, the difference between CEO pay in America' largest 350 companies and the pay that an average worker earns was less than 30:1. Since 1998, this ratio has increased to more than 300:1.
- Page 86: The average S&P 1500 firm CEO is 58 years old, up three years since 2003.
- Page 99: Frederick Taylor's goal was to make people as reliable and efficient as machines they served.
- Page 99: Taylorism created distinction between workers and managers. Managers became responsible for setting schedules, selecting tools, defining methods, and punishing people who did not follow rules.
- Page 100: Once, the company SAP had more than 5,000 key performance indicators.
- Page 111: Between 2003 and 2021, administrative roles at Yale increased from 151 to 964 people.
- Page 123: In companies with more than 5,000 employees, there are 8 management levels or more. 2/3 of nonmanagers say that they have little or only moderate control over their work methods and job priorities. 8 out of 10 nonmanagers say that their ideas are met with indifference, skepticism or resistance.
- Page 190: Decades of consolidation, along with the winner-take-all dynamics of digital technology, have left us with an economy that is dominated by powerful, politically connected oligopolies.
- Page 120: In most organizations, a single "no" from the person's manager can kill his or her idea. In a bureaucracy, there is only one place to sell an idea: Up the chain of command. This stands in stark contrast to Silicon Valley in California, where it is not unusual to get turned down more than 10 times before finding a willing backer to an idea.
- Page 248: A single, formal hierarchy causes problems, for example because managers feel qualified to want to decide on issues where they lack competence.
- Page 268: In a bureaucracy, censorious managers often prevent people from asking quetions or admitting mistakes.
- Page 341: Bureaucracies are designed to exploit, not to explore.
- Page 341: Bureaucracies are managed by people who favor the status quo.
Questions to determine the level of bureaucracy
- Page 125: How many management levels are there in the organization?
- Page 125: What percentage of your time do you spend on preparing reports, securing sign-offs, complying with staff requests, and participating in review meetings?
- Page 125: How much does bureaucracy slow decision-making and action in the organization?
- Page 125: To what extent are your interactions with your manager and other leaders focused on internal issues such as resolving disputes, securing resources and/or getting approvals?
- Page 125: How much freedom do frontline teams have to design their work, solve problems, and test ideas.
- Page 125: How often are frontline team members involved in the design and development of change initiatives?
- Page 125: How do people in the organization react to unconventional ideas?
- Page 125: How easy is it for an employee to launch a new project that requires a small team and a bit of seed funding?
- Page 125: How common are political behaviours in the organization?
- Page 125: How often do political skills, as opposed to demonstrated competence, influence who gets ahead in the organization?
Other research from the book
- Page 232: Break administrative functions into smaller units and make them compete with outside providers.
- Page 235: The more confident someone appears, the more likely we are to believe that they are genuinely capable, whether or not that is true. Overconfident individuals are perceived as more competent than others. Higher levels of narcissism are associated with faster promotion to the CEO role.
- Pages 237-239: Human beings are in-group biased. We rate most highly those people, who are most like us. Doing that we divide the world into "us" versus "them". Examples: 1. Native-born vs. immigrant. 2. Conservative vs. liberal. 3. Believer vs. non-believer. 4. Attractive vs. plain. Favoritism is ineffective and produces poor quality.
- Page 337: Strategy dilemmas: 1. Profitability vs. growth. 2. Scale vs. flexibility. 3. Short term vs. long term. 4. Execution vs. Innovation. 5. Discipline vs. creativity. 6. Diligence vs. speed. 7. Prudence vs. risk-taking. 8. Centralization vs. decentralization. 9. Compliance / control vs. autonomy / freedom. 10. Size vs. agility. 11. Exploit vs. explore.
- Page 437: Competence in the leadership tasks that really matter - spotting opportunities, energizing colleagues, challenging vested interests, reimagining business models, and nurturing others - does not correlate with hierarchy.
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