Management humanista: la estrategia son las personas
Source: https://www.plataformaeditorial.com/libro/6944-management-humanista ↗
Marcet and García argue for a humanist register in management — treating people as people rather than as resources, which in contemporary corporate practice is a more radical position than it should be.
The Spanish business-writing tradition is thinner than the Anglo one, and this book is one of its clearer recent contributions; Marcet writes regularly for La Vanguardia and the book gathers ideas he has been developing for years.
For product direction it is a useful counterweight to the more transactional frameworks that dominate tech literature.
Read alongside Drucker for the broader humanist tradition in management.
Particularly useful for Spanish-speaking leaders needing vocabulary that travels in Spanish-speaking organisations.
Central argument
Marcet and García argue that effective management requires treating people as ends in themselves rather than as human capital to be optimized — a humanist thesis they position not as soft idealism but as a strategic necessity. The central claim is that the dominant corporate framing of people as resources is not merely ethically impoverished but practically self-defeating, producing organizations incapable of the trust and discretionary effort that real performance demands. The book draws on ideas Marcet has developed over years of writing and consulting to articulate a vocabulary for Spanish-language business culture specifically, rather than translating Anglo frameworks wholesale.
Critique
The book's main vulnerability is that it risks preaching to the converted: leaders already disposed toward humanist values will find confirmation, while those embedded in extractive management cultures — who most need the argument — are unlikely to be moved by an appeal that does not engage seriously with the structural and incentive pressures that produce dehumanizing management in the first place. There is also a tension in positioning humanist management as both intrinsically right and instrumentally effective; if the humanist case rests on performance outcomes, it concedes the very transactional logic it seeks to displace.
Why it matters for product
For a CPO, the book's core challenge lands directly in the perennial tension between shipping velocity and team sustainability — the pressure to treat product teams as delivery units rather than as thinking communities capable of genuine discovery work. Marcet and García's framing gives language for resisting metric regimes that hollow out product roles, particularly useful when arguing organizational design decisions — why a product trio needs psychological safety, or why OKRs without human judgment become a compliance theater — inside Spanish-speaking leadership contexts where the Anglo vocabulary of 'empowered teams' often fails to travel.