The Beyond Bureaucracy Challenge seeks to advance progress on making organizations genuinely fit for human beings—more inspiring, open, and free. We invite management innovators from around the world in every realm of endeavor to share the most progressive practices and disruptive ideas around:

• Making organizations more inspiring and engaging: What does it mean to build an organization in which everyone is aligned by a deeply-felt sense of purpose—and in which management assumptions and practices inspire and unleash imagination, initiative, and energy from every quarter?
• Developing an outside-in orientation: What does it take to eliminate the gaps between “sense” and “respond,” to inject the voice of the customer and other relevant stakeholders into every decision, and to make the insights and observations of every individual—from edge to edge—matter?
• Managing without managers: How do we reduce the performance drag of top-heavy management structures, replace “manager-management” with a more agile self- or peer-management, and replace rigid hierarchy with a vibrant social system?

Read more about the Beyond Bureaucracy Challenge in Gary Hamel and Colin Price’s post and see the list of the entries to date at the bottom of this page.

Share Hack Share Story.

Submit a Hack (a disruptive idea, radical fix, or experimental design) or a Story (a real-world case study of a single practice, an initiative, or a broad-based transformation) on the subject of making organizations more inspiring and engaging, developing an outside-in orientation, and/or managing without managers.

Participation is open to any registered member of the MIX. Join here.

Simply follow the guidelines for submitting a Hack or Story—and be sure to choose “Beyond Bureaucracy Challenge” from the “Related Challenge” drop-down menu.

MIXers may (and are encouraged to) team up to co-author submissions. (Here’s more information on inviting others to collaborate on your entry.

Submissions may draw on secondary source materials but should be based primarily on first-hand experience or an original idea. In every case, be sure to credit all those who contributed to your story or hack and provide citations to external reference material.

The Beyond Bureaucracy Challenge will unfold in two stages: a preliminary submission phase (Deadline: December 23, 2011) and a final round for several finalists or finalist teams (Deadline: February 1, 2012).

All entries will be judged by our panel of leading management thinkers and progressive practitioners, including:

• Colin Price, director of McKinsey & Company
• Gary Hamel, cofounder, the MIX, author of The Future of Management
• Tom Malone, professor, MIT Sloan School of Management, founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence
• Eric Hellweg, Editor, Harvard Business Review Online
• Polly LaBarre, editorial director, the MIX, author of Mavericks at Work
• Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat
  

Winners will receive significant recognition as management innovators on the MIX, Harvard Business Review and HBR.org, the McKinsey Quarterly and McKinseyQuarterly.com. Winners will also earn the chance to appear at the MIX Live gathering scheduled for spring 2012 (details to come).