Book SummaryHumanocracy, by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Humanocracy

In Humanocracy, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini propose a new way to build and run organizations: using human-focused principles, as opposed to bureaucratic principles like efficiency and employee obedience. The authors believe that, by doing so, companies can increase each employee’s contributions and job satisfaction, thereby benefiting both the company and its workers. They call this type of organization a humanocracy to emphasize how different it is from bureaucracy; for clarity, this guide will refer to these organizations as human-focused companies.

Gary Hamel is a professional management consultant, author, and co-founder of the [Management...

Humanocracy Summary What Is a Human-Focused Company?

According to Hamel and Zanini, a human-focused company is an organization that’s designed to bring out and harness each employee’s full creative potential, instead of forcing people into lockstep using rules and micromanagement. In other words, a human-focused company optimizes people’s contributions to the company, rather than just their obedience and their production numbers.

Furthermore, the authors say the central belief behind a human-focused company is that each person—regardless of role or job title—deserves the chance to nurture their unique ideas and creative gifts. Everyone has ideas that are worth exploring, and allowing them to do so could turn out to be more valuable to the company than forcing them to just carry out their official duties.

(Shortform note: While human-focused companies should, according to the authors, foster innovation and creativity, that doesn’t mean leaving employees to figure out everything by themselves: To thrive, they’ll still need some training in their basic work tasks. Training employees well and encouraging creativity can also boost their inventiveness: One study found that in the workplace, creativity is [the link...

Humanocracy Summary Why We Need Human-Focused Companies

Hamel and Zanini say that human-focused companies are necessary because employees at traditional companies are bored, frustrated, and disillusioned—in fact, only 15% of people currently feel engaged at work. This widespread disengagement is bad for people and bad for business.

(Shortform note: Present employee engagement numbers aren’t quite as bad as Hamel and Zanini describe here—it’s true that only 15% of employees reported feeling engaged in 2017, but that number is up to 36% as of the latest Gallup poll. Even so, that means only just over a third of employees feel happy and engaged in the workplace, so there’s still a great deal of room for improvement.)

How to Engage Employees

According to Hamel and Zanini, to solve the problem of disengaged and disillusioned employees, businesses need to completely change how they think about their workers. It’s time to move away from seeing employees as mere resources and instead **start seeing...

Humanocracy Summary Building a Human-Focused Company

Now that we’ve discussed what human-focused companies are and why they matter, we’ll present some tips for building one of your own. Note that the authors’ purpose here isn’t to give you a step-by-step process for starting a new company—countless other books and business guides already do that—but rather, to make sure that the company you build upholds human-focused principles.

To begin with, remember the main goals of a human-focused company: minimizing bureaucracy and maximizing each employee’s creative potential. Achieving these goals will require building human-focused principles into every aspect of the company, from daily operations to executive decisions.

Hamel and Zanini say that it’s often better to start your own company and build it around human-focused principles from the ground up—bureaucracy emphasizes stability and control, and as such, existing companies that rely on it naturally resist change. Furthermore, power in a bureaucracy tends to be concentrated in the hands of a few decision-makers at the top of the organization, so if you’re not one of those decision-makers, then you’ll have an even harder time turning an existing organization into a human-focused...

Shortform Exercise: Apply Human-Focused Principles to Your Work

Humanocracy’s authors argue that most companies have much more bureaucracy than they need and that we should replace bureaucratic practices with human-focused principles. Take some time now to think about how bureaucracy might be hindering your work and how you could replace it with human-focused approaches.

What’s one bureaucratic practice that you regularly engage in at work? (For example, maybe you’re a manager who demands daily reports from your team members, or you might be an experienced team member who still has to ask permission before giving any customer a refund.)