Hey, happy Monday.
Imagine a company where…
No one has a leader.
Each employee chooses to be responsible for a particular area.
Everyone is allowed to spend the company’s money, for its own sake, for example, buying a new machine, even hundreds of thousands of euros.
Titles do not count.
Pay is decided together with colleagues, not by hierarchy, but by a conversation that happens once a year about one’s contribution. There are those who rightly ask for a raise. But also those who think it is fair to receive less….
It seems impossible and yet it is happening in so many companies.
These companies exist
You know what? They are not small, nor are they poor.
On the contrary, their size and performance are superior to those of competitors in terms of profitability, competitiveness and innovation.
The safest, highest quality, lowest cost, most productive and most profitable steel and steel products company in the world → NUCOR
The World’s Largest IoT Group → HAIER
[About the replay of the ▶STRTGY Meeting with Federico Ferretti Head of Design at Haier]
State-of-the-art private health care organization so efficient that it saves the Dutch state 40% of health care spending. 10,000+ employees in 25 countries. → BUURTZOG
The producer of 10 percent of the world’s tomatoes has no executives → MORNING STAR
So it only works with the big ones?
On the contrary. These companies have become great because of their choice to put humanity ahead of bureaucracy.
We are often dazzled by the management style that comes from Silicon Valley and startups that become global brands, causing us to lose sight of one of the most important revolutions: the organizational revolution.
At a time when ChatGPT and the acceleration that AI is having in our lives calls into question the future of work, the most frightened companies are precisely those that have given themselves robotic, rigid and questionable rules and are unable to change because of this self-made ballast: bureaucracy.
Join the conversation with Michele Zanini, author of Humanocracy
Michele Zanini is co-founder of Management Lab. Together with Gary Hamel, Zanini helps future-oriented organizations become more resilient, innovative and engaging workplaces.
Today, Monday, December 19, at 6:30 p.m. he will connect from Boston to meet the community in the twenty-second STRTGY Meeting, the last in 2022.
We will talk about the pitfalls of bureaucracy; how the pioneers of this new management style have equipped themselves with a new organizational paradigm; and most importantly, on what principles to trigger change toward a stronger, more resilient, innovative, profitable, because human organization.
Hacking management with the 7 principles of Humanocracy
All change to be lasting starts with small changes that prove successful and make old practices inconvenient to carry forward. Zanini and Hamel’s book, in addition to being a manifesto for a new way of working, is also a management hack manual.
Where to start?
From identifying experiments in 7 areas.
Ownership: how to give back passion, commitment and inspiration by making sure they understand the value of their impact and can take responsibility for results.
Market: how to leverage collective intelligence, agility, competition, and dynamic resource allocation.
Meritocracy: how to make sure that an individual’s growth depends on the value of his or her contribution and not on corporate politics or hierarchy.
Community: how to make people feel part of something bigger than themselves and not employees of the same business name.
Openness: how to encourage diversity of thought and spur people to express their opinions even if they are at odds with their boss.
Experimentation: how to foster innovation and anticipate competition not only when the market demands it but as a constant process of exploring opportunities.
Paradoxes: short term or long term, growth or profitability, creativity or discipline, speed or precision. How to empower people to solve the paradoxes generated by challenges by equipping teams with numbers, information, and values to follow.
Spoiler: no organization in the world has yet been able to simultaneously adopt all human-centric princes, yet the companies I mentioned earlier, and so many others in the book, show the incredible power to get ahead of the curve and be richly rewarded for the risk.
However, the greatest risk is not to change.
Humanocracy is a call to not tolerate spending our lives in organizations that are less capable than the people in them.
Why you can’t miss
Whether you are the owner, manager or employee of a company of any size but with high ambitions…
It is time to rethink an organization that puts strategy back in people’s hands, that enables them to change the rules of the game. And win.
An urgent transformation! Don’t wait for investiture from above or special authorization to start today.
I do my best to support professionals like you, visionaries and pragmatists in reimagining the future of leadership, strategy and innovation for our companies. This is your chance to access information otherwise intended only for a few executives in expensive seminars, here at STRTGY you can literally walk into a Zoom call and work with the best.
I’ll wait for you in the room,
ALWAYS MAKE PROGRESS ⤴
-Antonio
