By Janice Yellon
About the Author
Dr. Gary P. Hamel is an American management expert, a professor at London Business School, and a founder of Management Innovation Exchange (MIX). Dr. Hamel has written for the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Fortune, the Harvard Business Review, and a number of books including this WSJ bestseller, Humanocracy.
Michele Zanini is the co-author of Humanocracy and the co-founder of the Management Lab, helping forward-thinking organizations become more resilient, innovative, and engaging places to work. Mr. Zanini was previously an Associate Partner at McKinsey & Company and a leader in the firm’s organization, strategy, and financial services practices. He also spent five years as a policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, a public policy think-tank.
About the Book
“Creating organizations as amazing as the people inside them” is the book’s inspiring subtitle. Humanocracy warns about the dangers and limitations of bureaucratic organizations where, for a variety of reasons, employees are not motivated to bring their best to work each day. The book’s goal is to lay out a blueprint for turning every job into a good job. Rather than deskilling work, it explains the need to upskill employees, increase creative content of every role and redesign work environments to solicit the everyday genius of every human being.
The book introduces companies where employees design their own jobs, define work goals and methods and are encouraged to grow skills, unencumbered by red tape. These employees are trusted to use their best judgment, are accountable to colleagues, help shape strategy and direction of the organization, where their influence and compensation depend on abilities, not rank.
This is unfortunately not the reality for most employees, where conformity discourages entrepreneurship and narrow roles block personal growth, creating organizations less energetic than the people inside of them.
Lessons in Leadership
Whether your organization has a few or thousands of employees, this book offers innovative ideas about how to challenge the status quo and inspire your employees to become problem solvers and business-savvy decision-makers.
It provides ideas of how to turn up the entrepreneurial flame in your organization. As business owners, we would like to think that employees show up and do their best every day, however without the proper environment and leadership, that is most likely not the case.
Humanocracy introduces ideas about how to teach front-line staff to think like business people, cross-train associates in small multi-functional teams and give them P&L responsibilities, pair new employees with mentors, encourage employees to tackle improvement opportunities, and treating individuals as indispensable to the company’s success.
Vanguard companies and their leaders have deep convictions that when ordinary employees are given a chance to learn grow and contribute, they will achieve extraordinary results. Over time employees become deeply knowledgeable, endlessly inventive, and customer-focused. The goal is to create self-managing micropreneurs leading to incredibly successful bottom-line results.
Implementing even one of the hundreds of ideas and examples in this book can positively influence your organization. It is changing ours.
About The Reader/Reviewer
Janice Yellon is the Founder and President of VizBiz Solutions, a firm that provides insight and results for manufacturing clients by implementing the BizBytes®Sales Activity System. Janice’s background in commissioned technical sales, generating more than $100 million in revenue for clients over 25 years was the stimulus in 2012 for creating the 10-person firm that works 1:1 with manufacturers to guide them to greater success and profitability. Janice is also an exercise enthusiast including walking, adventure trail biking, yoga, golfing, and a purveyor of healthy food and nutritional supplements.
