Manifesto for Human(e) Leadership: The Book

A year ago, I pub­lished the six the­ses of the Man­i­festo for Human(e) Lead­er­ship on this blog. The response was over­whelm­ing. Almost 600 peo­ple have signed the Man­i­festo since, I have had count­less inspir­ing con­ver­sa­tions, talks and work­shops. And, of course, I have con­tin­ued to think and write about the dif­fer­ent the­ses and lead­er­ship in gen­er­al. There­fore, I take this anniver­sary as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to pub­lish the man­i­festo in detail as a small book at Lean­pub.

At some point in Jan­u­ary 2017, dur­ing our agile trans­for­ma­tion of BMW Group IT, we asked our­selves how lead­er­ship in an agile orga­ni­za­tion had to change. If self-orga­ni­za­tion is the cen­tral prin­ci­ple of agili­ty, we won­dered what role the “boss” plays. We there­fore invit­ed dif­fer­ent hier­ar­chi­cal lev­els from the vice pres­i­dent to the employ­ee to explore this ques­tion togeth­er in the sense of mutu­al expec­ta­tions between hier­ar­chy and self-orga­niz­ing team.

The result were many many sticky notes and the idea to sum­ma­rize them in the style of the famous Man­i­festo for Agile Soft­ware Devel­op­ment. The many good impuls­es from the work­shop had an effect on me and so I devel­oped the­sis by the­sis via Twit­ter and LinkedIn in pub­lic dia­logue. On Feb­ru­ary 8th last year, I final­ly was able to sum­ma­rize and pub­lish the six the­ses on the Man­i­festo for Human(e) Leadership. 

In the course of the last year I have fur­ther elab­o­rat­ed the thoughts behind the the­ses and many that com­ple­ment them well here in the blog. On the occa­sion of the first anniver­sary of the Man­i­festo I decid­ed to pub­lish all this as a small book on Lean­pub (there is also a Ger­man ver­sion). I am always look­ing for­ward to feed­back and impuls­es on the one hand and, of course, to a broad dis­sem­i­na­tion of the book on the other. 

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