Persistent in Efforts, Modest in Expectations

The yearning for a new and better form of cooperation, one that creates value not despite valuing people but because of it, is greater than ever. Taylorism and industrialization degraded people to resources. Only the labor of the unskilled worker was in demand, and Henry Ford once complained that whenever he asked for a pair of hands, he got a brain as well. In our age of knowledge work, people’s roles, qualifications, and demands have diversified. Yet the basic principle remains: we still view and run organizations as machines and treat employees as cogwheels.¹

I Have a Dream

I have this dream of a new and better working world.

I have the dream that the economy will someday serve people and life, and they in turn will serve it.

I have the dream that people are seen as the ends of economic activity, not just the means.

I have a dream that we shelve the failed attempt to motivate people with incentives and build organizations that don’t demotivate people so much that they need external motivation.

I have a dream that people will no longer be used as resources, and that developing individual potential will be seen as a decisive competitive factor.

I have this dream every day.

Let’s dream together. Let’s create a new and better world of work step by step, and build humane organizations for the age of digitalization. “Persistent in our efforts, modest in our expectation of success,” as Götz W. Werner, founder of the German drugstore chain dm, wisely put it.²

Enabling Self-Leadership

In a world in which it is “normal that many things have become different and are becoming more different faster and faster,” as the business education teacher and time researcher Karlheinz A. Geißler aptly put it,³ the role of leadership is at the very least up for discussion.

Leadership is not about you and your ego but about making others successful. For Götz W. Werner, leadership was legitimate only when it enabled self-leadership.⁴ Leadership is an attitude, not a position. This book describes that attitude and the principles of new, agile, digital, and above all humane leadership.

As mentioned in the introduction, I wrote the six theses at the core of this Manifesto for Humane Leadership in 2018, during BMW Group IT’s agile transformation. They were my first attempt to answer how leadership must change to enable empowerment and self-organization, the foundations of true agility.

In hindsight, though, the transformation was just a welcome opportunity to breathe new life into the long-standing concepts of servant leadership. Over time, this book became my idealistic and perhaps naïve attempt to create organizations and working environments that are more “species-appropriate” for knowledge workers.

The agile transformation at BMW Group IT also explains the form of my manifesto, which is deliberately modeled on the seminal “Manifesto for Agile Software Development.”⁵ The format avoids black-and-white thinking in favor of areas of tension and growth. Take “Individuals and interactions over process and tools”: both sides are valuable, but the first deserves more weight here and now.

The Manifesto for Humane Leadership draws on Peter Drucker’s groundbreaking work on knowledge work and the leadership of knowledge workers. It also draws on the positive image of humankind in Theory Y, from Douglas McGregor’s much-neglected book “The Human Side of Enterprise.”⁶ The title alludes to this human side of organizations and collaboration.

Species-Appropriate Keeping of Knowledge Workers

More than half a century has passed since Peter Drucker coined the term knowledge work in 1959.⁷ Knowledge work means thinking up and creating something new. Knowledge workers use their knowledge, experience, and creativity to generate new insights. They carry their means of production in their heads, which makes them far more independent than the assembly-line workers of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s day.

Back then, the manager was the expert whose task was to use unskilled workers’ labor as productively as possible. That dehumanized workers into interchangeable cogs in a gigantic machine and made them dependent on their place on the assembly line. They needed the factory owner’s means of production to trade their labor for money. Knowledge work turned this upside down. Now the organization depends on knowledge workers, who can easily take their means of production with them.

Around the time Drucker introduced knowledge work, Douglas McGregor questioned Taylorism’s negative view of people and called for a much more positive one. He recognized that the prevailing Theory X, which assumes that people are lazy and must be motivated to perform, harms knowledge work. Theory Y, which sees people as motivated and willing to perform, serves it far better.⁸ If people are unwilling to perform, the cause is often the system, not the people. We need to fix the system, not the people.

Long before the term became fashionable, Drucker postulated that knowledge workers must be led at eye level. To him, leadership is an equally important function in making a group of people or an entire organization successful. In knowledge work, the relationship between worker and manager is no longer one of subordination but one of cooperation, much like that in an orchestra:⁹

Their relationship, in other words, is far more like that between the conductor of an orchestra and the instrumentalist than it is like the traditional superior-subordinate relationship. The superior in an organization employing knowledge workers cannot, as a rule, do the work of the supposed subordinate any more than the conductor of an orchestra can play the tuba. In turn, the knowledge worker is dependent on the superior to give direction and, above all, to define what the score is for the entire organization–that is, what are the standards and values, performance and results. And just as an orchestra can sabotage even the ablest conductor–and certainly even the most autocratic one–a knowledge organization can easily sabotage even the ablest, let alone the most autocratic, superior.

Drucker therefore concluded that knowledge workers should be managed like volunteers, as if they were in the organization purely out of conviction and for a higher common cause:¹⁰

Altogether, an increasing number of people who are full-time employees have to be managed as if they were volunteers. They are paid, to be sure. But knowledge workers have mobility. They can leave. They own their means of production, which is their knowledge. What motivates–and especially what motivates knowledge workers–is what motivates volunteers. Volunteers, we know, have to get more satisfaction from their work than paid employees, precisely because they do not get a paycheck. They need, above all, challenge. They need to know the organization’s mission and to believe in it. They need continuous training. They need to see results.

However correct these findings were and still are in theory, practice has lagged behind for over six decades. Hierarchy is still the measure of all things, and eye level remains mostly lip service. That managers were reluctant to give up their positions of power came as no surprise. But we expected knowledge workers to grow aware of their new power and drive the management revolution forward. In some sectors they have, and “The war for talent is over–talent has won!” is a painful truth for many companies. Yet the broad mass of knowledge workers still fit themselves into antiquated structures.

The Coronavirus Pandemic as New Work Boost?

One can speculate at length about the astonishing inertia in moving organizations and leadership culture toward a more “species-appropriate keeping” of knowledge workers. Perhaps the pressure of suffering was too weak, or it grew so slowly that, like the proverbial frog in slowly heating water, we never jumped.

The coronavirus pandemic abruptly changed this in the spring of 2020 and opened entirely new perspectives for many knowledge workers and organizations. The uncertainty and confusion prompted a significant rethink and reorientation, which the economist Anthony Klotz named “The Great Resignation” in 2021.¹¹

Since the second half of 2021, employees in the US have been quitting their jobs at an unusually high rate. Some of those resignations had merely been postponed, because at the start of the pandemic everyone was glad to have a secure job, but that explains only part of the increase. The situation seems to be stabilizing again, as the October 2024 results of the JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) show.¹² Still, the pandemic gave many people a moment to pause and reflect.

Results of JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) of the Economic Policy Institute (as of October 2024)

The pandemic, with its drastic countermeasures, its politically fueled and massively media-amplified fear, and, last but not least, the experience of illness or death, prompted many to reflect on their own lives and career choices. Everyone has such moments at the major crossroads of life. But the pandemic hit the whole world at once, so these individual moments of reflection added up to a global trend.

Beyond this psychological burden, work changed abruptly and fundamentally for most knowledge workers, and for many that was a revelation. Knowledge work was finally freed from time and space and became fully digital. One may quip that over the last decade, COVID-19 did more for digitalization than all the CDOs, CIOs, and CEOs combined. “A crisis is a productive state. You simply have to eliminate its aftertaste of catastrophe.” This bon mot by Max Frisch applies here too. To contain the coronavirus, we had to learn distributed digital collaboration in virtual space at a previously unimaginable speed. The pandemic triggered much reflection on the future of work and, at the same time, forced us to find creative solutions.

The question that first motivated this Manifesto for Humane Leadership was how leadership must change when an organization moves from traditional to agile. Ultimately, it is irrelevant where the impetus to rethink the role of management and turn to a more humane form of leadership comes from. It may come, as for Peter Drucker, from the profound realization that knowledge workers need to be managed radically differently (see “Species-Appropriate Keeping of Knowledge Workers”). It may come from an agile transformation that raises the question of new leadership again. Or it may come from the pressure of a global pandemic that disrupted collaboration, and from what we experienced and learned along the way.

I, for one, learned a great deal about the value of time flexibility and autonomy. My wife and I have three children. With our two elder daughters, Marie and Ella, I always tried to spend a lot of time with the family: parental leave, less traveling, fewer evening events, careful balancing of extra miles. With our youngest, Valentin, born in January 2020, I could do more. I worked from home a lot during his first three years and saw far more of his early years than I had of his sisters’. In 2020 our eldest daughter also started school, and I was always able to help with homework and homeschooling and give her moral support. I have never been as fit as during this time, because it was so easy to squeeze a short run into my schedule. This seamless integration of work and private life gave me a better balance and less stress, and ultimately better performance.

Unlike many others, I knew the value of autonomy and of being in charge of my own time before the pandemic. In 2015 I had made the unsatisfying move from abundant time flexibility in our start-up to a classic presence culture at BMW Group IT, with eight hours or more in the office (see Chapter 1). Our small consulting firm initially had no office at all, and later only a small one where the management team met once a week. We spent most of our time at clients’ premises or working from home. After all, a consultant earns money by working with the customer, not by sitting in the office. That was common sense back then.

Part of my pain of adaptation when I moved to BMW in 2015 stemmed from the corporate world’s rigidity about where and when work is done. It hurt all the more because I would have liked to spend more time with my family after the birth of our first daughter in 2014.

The pandemic showed many people how fulfilling it can be to integrate work and private life flexibly. This has a local aspect, because “work-life integration” can happen only where the employee lives. But local flexibility alone is of little use if constant availability is expected and the work is packed so tightly that it boils down to the tiring pattern many of us knew in the first year of the pandemic: “eat, sleep, zoom, repeat.”

“Remote work” is therefore a misnomer. Its primary benefit is time flexibility, not the ability to work from anywhere. We should remember that when imposing return-to-office orders, as so many companies have done since the pandemic. The issue is not that people must be physically in an office again. It is that being in the office at fixed hours reduces their ability to integrate life and work flexibly. For many, that is a deal breaker.

Leadership at a Distance

As we all witnessed, collaboration between knowledge workers can move into virtual space overnight. Leadership culture and managerial practices, unfortunately, cannot be changed at the push of a button. The question many managers asked at the start of the pandemic, “How do I check whether my employees are doing their work from home?”, was an unintended confession. The micromanager had been obsolete for quite a while; in the era of distributed collaboration, he is finally bankrupt.

As remote work became the new normal, trust issues came to light. The health crisis became a confidence crisis. Remote leadership worked well for leaders who relied on purpose and trust rather than command and control. Many other managers unintentionally revealed their questionable image of humankind while secretly hoping for a quick return to the old culture of presence.

The years of enforced distributed work could have been an opportunity to switch from input to impact. After all, presence in the office had never correlated strongly with performance. In knowledge work, results count; when, how, and where they are achieved doesn’t matter. Companies such as Basecamp¹³ and Red Hat¹⁴, which are largely distributed, have long organized themselves by this principle of meritocracy. Some other organizations gained the insight during the pandemic and went fully remote.¹⁵ Most companies, however, miserably missed this unique opportunity.

Robert Frost’s famous poem “The Road Not Taken” ends with these lines:¹⁶ “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.” Managers and their organizations face the same choice: the overgrown path toward leadership based on meaning, trust, and self-organization, or the well-trodden path of classic hierarchical management with command and control.

This choice has always existed. In this global crisis it has become more dramatic, and it no longer seems a decision between good and better but a question of to be or not to be.

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1. Frederic Laloux and Ken Wilber, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness (Nelson Parker, 2014). ↩

2. Götz W. Werner, Womit ich nie gerechnet habe: die Autobiographie, 5. Auflage, List-Taschenbuch 61254 (Berlin: List Taschenbuch, 2019). ↩

3. Karlheinz A. Geißler, Alles hat seine Zeit, nur ich hab keine Wege in eine neue Zeitkultur (München: Oekom Verlag, 2014), 232. ↩

4. Werner, Womit ich nie gerechnet habe, 173. ↩

5. Kent Beck et al., “Manifesto for Agile Software Development,” 2001, https://agilemanifesto.org/ ↩

6. Douglas McGregor and Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, The Human Side of Enterprise, Annotated ed (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006). ↩

7. Peter F. Drucker, Landmarks of Tomorrow, Harper Colophon Books (Harper, 1959). ↩

8. McGregor and Cutcher-Gershenfeld, The Human Side of Enterprise. ↩

9. Peter F. Drucker and Joseph A. Maciariello, Management, Rev. ed (New York, NY: Collins, 2008), 72. ↩

10. Drucker and Maciariello, 72. ↩

11. Arianne Cohen, “How to Quit Your Job in the Great Post-Pandemic Resignation Boom,” Bloomberg Businessweek, May 10, 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-10/quit-your-job-how-to-resign-after-covid-pandemic. ↩

12. “JOLTS,” Economic Policy Institute, accessed October 3, 2024, https://www.epi.org/indicators/jolts/. ↩

13. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever (London: Vermilion, 2010). ↩

14. Jim Whitehurst, The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance (Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business Review Press, 2015). ↩

15. Kathryn Vasel, “These Companies Decided to Go Fully Remote – Permanently | CNN Business,” CNN, January 27, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/27/success/full-time-remote-decision-pandemic/index.html. ↩

16. Robert Frost, “A Group of Poems,” The Atlantic, August 1, 1915, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1915/08/a-group-of-poems/306620/. ↩