Humanocracy, Updated and Expanded: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them

A powerful new edition of the Wall Street Journal bestseller that helps leaders build radically more human—and capable—organizations.

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, readers 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 include:

Motivation: • Rallying colleagues to the challenge of reimagining management as usual Models: • Leveraging the experience of vanguard organizations that have successfully disrupted the bureaucratic status quo Mindsets: • Escaping the industrial-age thinking that undermines the quest to build radically more capable organizations Mobilization: • Activating a pro-change coalition to hack outmoded management systems and processes Migration: • 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.

© 2025 Harvard Business Review Press (Ebook): 9781647826383

Release date

Ebook: August 26, 2025