Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

by Gary Hamel, Michele Zanini

A Wall Street Journal Bestseller

In a world of unrelenting change and unprecedented challenges, we need organizations that are resilient and daring.

Unfortunately, most organizations, overburdened by bureaucracy, are sluggish and timid. In the age of upheaval, top-down power structures and rule-choked management systems are a liability. They crush creativity and stifle initiative. As leaders, employees, investors, and citizens, we deserve better. We need organizations that are bold, entrepreneurial, and as nimble as change itself. Hence this book.

In Humanocracy, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini make a passionate, data-driven argument for excising bureaucracy and replacing it with something better. Drawing on more than a decade of research and packed with practical examples, Humanocracy lays out a detailed blueprint for creating organizations that are as inspired and ingenious as the human beings inside them.

Critical building blocks

Motivation: Rallying colleagues to the challenge of busting bureaucracyModels: Leveraging the experience of organizations that have profitably challenged the bureaucratic status quoMindsets: Escaping the industrial age thinking that frustrates progressMobilization: Activating a pro-change coalition to hack outmoded management systems and processesMigration: 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 want to build an organization that can outrun change . . .If you're committed to giving every team member the chance to learn, grow, and contribute . . .. . . then this book's for you.

Whatever your role or title, Humanocracy will show you how to launch an unstoppable movement to equip and empower everyone in your organization to be their best and to do their best. The ultimate an organization that's fit for the future and fit for human beings.

Genres: Business, Leadership, Nonfiction, Management, Cultural, Audiobook, Buisness

445 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 18, 2020

About the author

Dr. 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.

Reviews

[Mukesh Gupta · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got a digital review copy via NetGalley.

Gary Hamel has been one of my favorite authors and management guru’s. In his most recent book Humanocracy, he lays out the case against bureaucracy and instead argues that we need to embrace what he calls “Humanocracy” as in build human centric organisations. He chronicles some interesting experiments being done worldwide with different management philosophies and based on them, posits some principles which when put in use can lead organisations to become a lot more human centric and can address the shackles that bureaucracy has on most organisations.

What is the book about:

The first third of the book is about the pitfalls of bureaucracy and why we need to move away from the management philosophies of the industrial age and get ready for the information age, where the human capital is as important, if not more, than any other kind of capital.

One of the things he says really struck a chord with me.: "Humans are resilient; Organisations are not!"

I totally agree with this line of reasoning. As a species, we are a resilient lot. However, as most of has have heard enough number of times, more and more organisations are dying faster and faster.

The second third of the book is a case study about two organisations which have been successful in rethinking their management of their businesses. The authors talk about how Haier (with their focus on creating an ecosystem of micro enterprises) and Nucor (with their intense focus on employees (Building people not products). Both the companies have clearly found their own niche on how to operate and manage their businesses and the authors do a great job in breaking down their business operations and culture for us to learn about how they run these businesses.

The last section of the book talks about the principles of building human centric organisations and all of them makes great sense. Looks simple but the trick is in getting the implementation right. The authors address this part by having a clearly laid out step-by-step instruction at the end of every chapter detailing a specific principle and at the end of the book by summarizing what the overall action plan could look like.

The principles that the authors talk about are

1. The Power of Ownership

2. The Power of Markets

3. The Power of Meritocracy

4. The Power of Community

5. The Power of Openness

6. The Power of Experimentation

7. The Power of Paradox

The authors also provide examples of organisations that are already living one of these principles already within their organisations {Svenska Handelsbanken, Vinci, Morning Star, Intel, Bridgewater, Alcoholics Anonymous, Southwest Airlines, 3M, etc}.

Ease of reading:

All in all, I thought that the book as a good, easy read. The flow was logical. The examples were concrete. There were just enough data points to make the case and enough explanation of what the data points meant. Some interesting details, specifically about how Haier & Nucor work. Overall, I thought that the book was extremely easy to read.

What I loved about the book:

I have been an ardent believer in human potential. My blogs in the past and my books are a testament to that. So, when someone comes out and says that it is time we rethought how we manage organisations and instead of limiting human potential via bureaucracy, can we allow the full potential of humans to shine, I love it. What is even better is that they showcase that this is no longer just a concept or a vision but is possible and show us how someone has already done this and has been successful in releasing human ingenuity. The case studies were just awesome.

What would I have done differently:

This is one of those books where it is difficult to find something that could have been done differently. There is only one thing that I can think of that the authors could have done differently. If I were writing this book, I would not have used up the amount of space that they used up to prove that bureaucracy doesn’t work and why it is important to look at ways to run our organisations without allowing bureaucracy stifle innovation. All of us know the pitfalls. So, I would have reduced the time and space in the book in that section and instead focused more on the other sections, maybe even leave everything else as it is, thereby making the book leaner.

In Conclusion:

In conclusion, it is my strong belief is that even if every organisation were to just pick one of the 7 principles that they share in the book and double down on that and bring it alive, we would already have a significant breakthrough in moving towards a human centric organisations and the businesses will benefit as a result.

I also believe that this book could not have arrived at a better time than now (covid19) because it is in such crisis, is such fundamental & significant change in management possible to pull off.

As they say, the best time to have planted a tree was 10 years back. Next best time is now!

The best time for having read and implemented the principles in this book was a couple of years back (which would have prepared us to be able to respond to the current crisis much better). The next best time is now!!!!

— This is a <<5>> star book for me.

[Frank Calberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Takeaways from reading the book:

What is bureaucracy?
https://www.calameo.com/read/00350737...

What is humanocracy?
https://www.calameo.com/read/00350737...

Why do we need humanocracy?
- Pages 33 and 40: Change is increasing. The acceleration of change is the product of radical shifts in the growth of computational power and network capacity. Since 1990, the power of mobile phones has increased thousands of times, and global Internet traffic has increased millions of times. Every day, more than 700,000 hours of new content gets uploaded to YouTube.
- Page 35: Unlike human beings, organizations are not good at adapting to change. The average age of a company on the S&P 500 index has fallen from 60 years in the 1950s to less than 20 years today.
- Page 38: 94% of executives express disappointment with their organization's innovation performance.
- Page 43: Globally, only 16% are engaged in their work.
- Page 43: Flourishing in an economy, which is continuously changing, requires initiative, creativity and courage. These values come from inside of us. They cannot be commanded.
- Page 48: Since the invention of bureaucracy in the 19th century, people have become better educated. Humans are capable of working in much better ways.

3 cases:
Buurtzorg: https://www.calameo.com/read/00350737...
Haier: https://www.calameo.com/read/00350737...
Morning Star: https://www.calameo.com/read/00350737...

Other research from the book:
- Pages 18 and 46: Between 1890 and 2016, the value created by an hour of labor increased 13-fold in the USA, 16-fold in Germany, and 8-fold in Great Britain. While capital accumulation, universal education, and scientific invention contributed to this, the biggest boost came from advances in bureaucratic management including workflow optimization, production planning, variance reporting, pay-for-performance, and capital budgeting.
- Page 92: In the US economy, 23 million people produce little or no economic value. In other words, 23 million people in the US could be refocused on more productive work.
- Page 186: We tend to rate most highly those who are most like us. It is hard for us to disentangle the question "Who is competent?" from the question "Who makes me feel comfortable?"
- Page 232: Listen to newcomers. Why? Because they have an innovation advantage. Their thinking is not constrained by experience.
- Page 232: Ask yourself what has not changed for a long time and to what extent that still makes sense.
- Page 248: Make it safe for people to disagree.

[Greg Hawod · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book presents a very good case against bureaucracy. Full of insights supported by comprehensive data, this also provides a very good alternative: humanocracy.

This is the first time I’ve encountered the word humanocracy. But applying the meaning used for democracy, I could assume that this means human power. Now this concept does not necessarily taken with political undertones as it applies to states. Rather the book explains the concept as it applies to business organizations in particular.

Several examples were given by the authors to illustrate how the philosophy of humanocracy looks like in action. These cases serve as a proof that companies can do away with the present bureaucratic set up as time goes by.

One thing I realized from reading this book is how the nature of bureaucracy brought about the many things we dislike in our workplaces. Examples are delays brought about by several layers of approvals, unrecognized talents, leadership apathy, unproductive competitions, lack of creativity, feeling of jot being listened to, and more.

While bureaucratic ideals may serve some benefits for the past centuries, this book argues that it cannot stand the present dynamic changes we are experiencing today.

[Nick • · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic look into organizations that decentralize, treat their teams like humans, develop innovative processes, and work to eliminate bureaucracy. While I disagree with the negative tone used to portray the HR department/function of an organization this book is worth the read. The mindset alone will be critical for the success of future firms.

[Hannah Hammes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this book was a five month slog: I just decided to bite the bullet and power through the last 40% in a four-day span.

What did I like about it? The book made a lot of excellent points that challenge the standard corporate "we just do it this way because we've always done it this way" thought processes and rhetoric. It calls for a greater human element to be added back into our work lives, lost somewhere in the creation of the modern 9 to 5. It also reiterates that most ideas about power being attached directly to a titled position should be scrutinized, and blindly assigning power to a role means that people who are not credible nor capable - quite literally just entitled - make decisions that they are not equipped to fully make. Consequently, the sweeping actions made by the few have devastating effects that reach far below them. Some notable quotes (in my opinion):

- “Power is the ability to afford not to learn.”
- "The single greatest threat to organizational resiliency is the unwillingness or inability for senior leaders to write off their own depreciating intellectual capital."
- "Bureaucracies defend the status quo long after the quo has lost its status."
- "A company can’t expect to win in hyper competitive markets if its operating units are expected to buy uncompetitive services from internal providers."
- "The burden of proof [of power] should be on those who wish to keep control [not on those being controlled]."

If you didn't have much context before reading this book, it would seem like an incessant attack on upper leaders and executives (which to be fair, most of this book is exactly that). However, with some greater insight to Hamel's thoughts, it's meant to be more of a wake-up call to the world of mega-companies, bringing attention to how we've allowed corporations to remove all of the meaningful human aspects out of our jobs for the sake of unnecessary hierarchal preservation.

So why the three stars instead of four or five?

I saw another review that said that this book felt like a "series of case studies" and I couldn't agree more. It feels like Hamel cherry-picked every example he could find of companies bucking the system with positive results and turned it into a book. It's obviously meant to be a "rah-rah" type story, persuading the reader to buy into his concepts... which means it lacks any sort of actual scientific or research rigor. Not once did he mention an example where a stab at implementing "Humanocracy" failed or had a negative effect. He never mentioned an example where a hierarchal or bureaucratic company was also able to increase productivity through its standard model. He didn't bother to explain the actual intricate details (I mean sure, he gave some process examples) of how a massive mega-corp can actually implement his idea beyond having "strategy meetings" and "hacking" drab policies. It seems like he was absolutely allergic to stating that sometimes, big companies need more oversight: you can't let everyone have free reign all the time - how would you even make that work? Where does any accountability lie? Everything in this book is anecdotal.

Additionally, he makes a lot of assumptions about human nature. Hamel makes broad generalizations about how all workers are stymied by their corporate overlords and how they aren't given opportunities to express their true talents. It fails to acknowledge that some workers do indeed like having structure and clear tasks, and that some others just simply aren't motivated for the greater good of business at all. It just seems like too big of a stretch to claim that all workers are suffering at the hands of top-down rules. Sometimes, those rules are there to keep people safe and in stable employment.

Finally, as much as he's trying to spin this concept as the antithesis of the bureaucratic prison that most companies are, a lot of what he's "selling" here doesn't really feel all that different or ground breaking: Have more strategy meetings! Ok? Make your internal services more competitive! We're already trying. Outsource ideas to more people! You don't say? ... This book often feels just as hollow and corporate as the companies he's trying to turn you against, and it feels like a name dropping opportunity for better or for worse, hitting all of the key buzzwords and concepts. Also, this book could have probably been half the length: by the time you get 75% of the way through, you feel like you've heard the same story five different ways.

Don't get me wrong - I dislike monotonous corporate drudgery just as much as the next guy, and I do truly believe we have squeezed all of the human emotion, color, and life out of jobs for the sake of productivity and profitability. I once read an article quote that said "Corporations are psychotic: if corporations are indeed 'persons,' their mental condition can accurately be described as pathological. Corporations have no innate moral impulses, and in fact they exist solely for the purpose of making money." I nodded vigorously reading that, because often it feels like you're just a soulless money generating asset with an employee ID.

However, what this book lacks is investigative and comparative rigor that would lend it greater credibility. Rather, it reads as a series of ultra-positive case studies selected for the sole purpose of getting buy-in to the idea of Hamel's Humanocracy. Does it have some good one-liners and several examples that really make you question why we let rigid bureaucratic systems dominate our lives? Absolutely - it's a heck of a sales pitch. But should it serve as a north star and as an instruction manual for making monumental, company-altering decisions off of? Probably not.

[Roberto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant and inspiring

Actually one of the best reading I did in the last years.
I knew Hamel for his provocative and inspiring contributions. Together with Michele Zanini he has created something that provides many ideas and, above all, invites readers to take the initiative in such a complex, but also so promising moment. Five stars well deserved.

[Jorge DeFlon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cómo rescatar nuestra humanidad de la creciente burocracia y deshumanización.

La salvación está en nosotros.

[Ronald J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gary Hamel as done it again, staying in the forefront of management thinking with Humanocracy. I was an enormous fan of his The Future of Management, where he made the case that management theory has stopped evolving (we’re still using theories from the late 19th century to mid-20th century. Humanocracy goes a step further by taking direct aim at bureaucracy, and it’s about time someone drove a dagger into the heart of this structure that inhibits human creativity and economic dynamism. I love to read books that have an axe to grind, and this one grinds away at a lamentable target. Hamel writes: “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. 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.

The authors profile several “vanguard companies” that prove that it’s possible to build organizations that are big and fast, disciplined and empowering, efficient and entrepreneurial, and bold and prudent, from Nucor, Morningstar, Gore, Southwest, among others. As he writes, “Bureaucracy was invented by human beings, and now it’s up to us to invent something better.” After all, human beings are incredibly resilient, but our organizations aren’t. While I have more of an economist’s view of large organizations—I don’t really care if they have a long life, as long as there is entrepreneurial dynamism, permissionless innovation, and creative destruction—from a management consultant perspective you have to work with your audience, so I can appreciate the authors passion for making larger organizations more nimble, such as this point:

“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. We need to replace bureaucracy with humanocracy. 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. Let’s be clear on one thing: bureaucracy must die. We can no longer afford its pernicious side effects. As humankind’s most deeply entrenched social technology, it will be hard to uproot, that’s OK. 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?”

The author’s Bureaucratic Mass Index Survey Questions are excellent, and if you’re involved in an organization that you suspect is more bureaucratic than it should be, they are worth answering (BMI survey, online at www.humanocracy.com/BMI). The case is overwhelming that what is needed is for organizations to perpetually perform what the authors termed a “burecotomy.” Anything less is dereliction of our humanness and creativity. It’s rare these days to read a business book that offers a prescription that is worthy of our highest calling. This is such a book. Read it and see for yourself.

[Steve Brock · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was Stevo's Business Book of the Week for the week of 8/23, as selected by Stevo's Book Reviews on the Internet and Stevo's Novel Ideas. In a world of unrelenting change and unprecedented challenges, we need organizations that are resilient and daring.

Find more Business Books of the week on my Goodreads Listopia page at https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/9..., and find many more recommended books on my Amazon Influencer page at https://www.amazon.com/shop/stevo4747 or by searching for me on Google.

[Sergio Caredda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gli autori propongono una ricetta per superare la classica organizzazione burocratica che ancora attanaglia molte organizzazioni. Grazie a una serie di esempi, tutti di aziende di settori tradizionali, ma fortemente caratterizzate da un approccio umano-centrico al business, si mostra che cambiare è possibile. Molto interessante soprattutto la parte legata alla valutazione del costo della burocrazia.

[Italo De Nubila · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is a nice thought being able to end bureaucracy in one’s company. How ever the book does never take into account a recurring situation in almost all third world companies: Theft. Put it theft into the equation and the ability to do most of the things in the book is almost cero. We have to overpay everything because of tedious processes and oversight of our own employees because of theft. If you live in the US/most of Europe it is probably a great read.

2.0 Stars ⭐️⭐️

[Toman Beinhocker · Rating 5 out of 5]

While the idea of bureaucracy and how it hinders organizational resilience and innovation isn't new, the book does a great job of laying out the costs. Not only does it provide a convincing inditement of traditional organizational practices, but it offers a set of compelling alternatives. And, more importantly and more distinctively when it comes to a management book, it provides some interesting pathways to busting bureaucracy--at the level of the individual (detox for bureaucrats!), team, and organizational level.

I thoroughly enjoyed it

[Anu]

I picked this up on the recommendation of Adam Grant, one of my favourite authors. There were some really great ideas in here - distributed responsibility, prioritising expertise over rank etc. But it felt somewhat dated and clunky for a tech setting. The examples of steel industries and AC companies were illustrative but were at times tangential for a modern technology company. I rarely complain of a book being boring, but I’m afraid this one felt so, because of the endless lists of attributes and features that didn’t compensate for the lack of a cogent narrative. I hesitate to rate the book based on this - maybe it’s just me? 🤷🏽‍♀️

[Leigh Ashton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love his perspective!

[Rachel Hope · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little long winded, but I definitely learned some practical ideas for how to improve my own company. The author loves Southwest, and I used to too, so it was ironic to finish this over Christmas 2022 when the airline is totally failing at recovering from a winter storm (and our SW flight was canceled so I finished the book on a 10 hour drive home!). Maybe a future version of the book will have an epilogue analyzing how Southwest’s culture either contributed to their problems or was abandoned in the pandemic and thus causes these catastrophic failures. I’m curious to see which way that story goes, because nothing I’m reading in the news is telling us what is going on internally.

[Tim Dugan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well sone nice ideas

But some of it was redundant with what we do today. Most technical staff doesn’t do that much bureaucratic stuff

Some of it sounds like “agile” not new

Difficult part figuring out how I can use tots information

After a while I got kind of bored with the book

Regarding flattening organizations and paying based on success: I can see pluses and minuses. Hiring might get tricky because people demand different market rates partly because of experience. People expect increased prestige with years of experience. It’s built into the labor market.

[Rodrigo Bastos · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hamel uses the word bureaucracy as a placeholder for all the different practices, structures and concepts that make organizations fail. His lack of rigour shows off again in the chapter on meritocracy, confusing concepts that are well established. Another management guru book with some nice stories but not very useful. 

[Love · Rating 4 out of 5]

A call to action with inspiring case studies

I love the Bureaucracy Mass Index and the term Bureausclerosis. Hamel and Zanini have a way with words. The book is a call to action, calling for radical change of organizations and management. A call to abandon the outdated bureaucratic model and adopt a human-centric, customer focused and agile model that is fit for 21 century organizations. The best part of the book is the cases from Haier, Nucor, Svenska Handelsbanken and other companies. The first and second part of the book makes the case for Humanocracy and describes two meaty cases from Haier and Nucor.

The third part is centered around a set of principles for organizations that want to become human-centric. The fourth part is about creating the human-centric organization, with a nice case study from Michelin. But the last part I found a bit disappointing in that it gives a couple of sunshine stories about how to go about organizing hackathons and workshops to spread Humanocracy in the organization. It feels like the type of cases a management consultant would put on his resumé, claiming to have fixed the problem with a few clever hacks, while in reality things started changing back to the normal state of affairs as soon as the consultant stepped out of the door.

All in all it is an aspirational and inspirational read for people that want to upgrade their organizations to a human-centric paradigm. And when it comes to toolboxes there are a plethora of those for free online, like liberating structures and tools hero.

[Bogdan Skaskiv · Rating 5 out of 5]

Чудова книга, яка не лише змушує думати, але й демонструє дієві практичні методи поступового руху до людинократії. Ті, хто стикався з бюрократією хоч раз у житті (а це ми всі), хоча б інколи задумувались "А чи можна інакше?" Правда в тому, що сучасне суспільство вже давно переросло старі порядки, і навіть в таких структурах як армія є можливість для реалізації принципів людинократії

[Adrian Panghe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Burocracies are innovation-phobic.

Companies are wasting more human capital than they are using.

The control habit is hard to break.

With bureaucracy, same as alcoholism, the first step is to admit you have a problem…

"we shape our tools, then our tools shape us...”

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well written, forward looking, innovative. It's that rare business/management book that isn't cheesy and justifies the genre.

[Ana Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

O melhor livro de "business" que li nos últimos tempos.

Pelo subtítulo já dá pra ter uma ideia do seu conteúdo: criando organizações que são tão incríveis quanto as pessoas que ali trabalham. Em essência, Hamel propõe que as pessoas são capazes de fazer muito mais do que fazem hoje e que a culpa desse potencial não cumprido é da burocracia engessada dos nossos modelos de gestão que não colocam as pessoas no centro dos processos (decisórios, estratégicos, executores, etc).

O livro é dividido em quatro partes:
- Porque colocar em xeque a burocracia? O interessante aqui é que ele constrói seu case do ponto de vista financeiro/econômico de forma tão estruturada quanto o ponto de vista humano.
- Dois exemplos práticos de empresas com princípios de burocracia-free, Nucor e Haier.
- Princípios importam mais que processos, uma sessão inteira a destrincher o que são os princípios da "humanocracia" em contrapartida à lógica limitante da burocracia.
- Metodologia para iniciar uma jornada em direção ao fim da burocracia.

Gostei muito do estilo realista, pé-no-chão, que trouxe valores que não são inteiramente novidade, mas que desafiam o status-quo. Não é mais um livro que dá nomes diferentes para conceitos existentes - este pode te surpreender de verdade!

[JWeiss · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inspirational

This is a good book to motivate one to explore areas of change to reduce and eliminate bureaucracy. It’s both inspiring and depressing at the same time. Hopefully our company will embrace these concepts and become a success story for a follow up book!

[Ashiana Jivraj · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think in setting up a company or rethinking a work stream, this book is a fascinating overview of successful company’s who have put power back into the hands of employees.

[Anton Jansson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insikt om hur djupt präglade vi är av byråkrati. Och att det går att förändra. Rekommenderar boken varmt, finns hopp om förändring.

[Jurriaan Kamer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must-read for anyone focused on modernising our workplaces.

[Juan Callejas Aquino · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I’ve read in a long time. Revolutionary, irreverent, profoundly human and very practical.

[Bülent Duagi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reads more as an anti-bureaucracy book rather than a book that shapes a credible new management model to replace bureaucracy. Enjoyed the stories about bureaucracy detox and corporate “hacktivists” and I’m waiting for the next book that better shapes the new management model.

[Anto Raimo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Vanilla new-age management book with some semi-interesting case studies that would be hard to apply to other companies.
I found this book lacking a structured punchline and narrative and offering little management insights. It's anachronistic to think of HR as a "bureaucratic function" in 2022, considering the raging war on talent the companies live day by day.
The book stands on a feeble hypothesis that is corroborated only by a handful of cherry picked examples, so I rate it poorly also from a research accuracy standpoint.

[Hannes Lindblom · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really like the ideals this book presents and I would love to work in an organization that lives by these ideas. Unfortunately I feel that the book falls into the trap of being unnecessary long and I feel that the valuable ideas are presented far apart with much filler in between. A caveat here might be though that I read a couple of other books in a related area recently which might have made this experience less unique.