I'm Adi Ignatius.

I'm Alison Beard, and this is the H-Bair Ideacast.

Alison, there has been a lot of talk about whether our institutions are up to today's challenges.

So I'm talking about schools, I'm talking about companies, I'm talking about other organizations that really continue to be run essentially as they were 100 years ago when our economic

and social needs were very,

very different. I'm particularly interested in how companies are structured and whether they're

set up to succeed in today's, you know, really fast-moving business environment.

Yeah, and I think this is a problem that we've been trying to solve for years, right?

Reorganizing to be more agile, more experimental, and more digital.

That's definitely happened. Our guest today, Yana Werner, argues that most companies still retain

in organizational structure that, yeah, may have evolved, but is still too rigid to make it in this

world. And the authors use a metaphor that the ideal modern organization should be like an octopus with tentacles that work separately, but also together with distributed intelligence, sensory awareness, and adaptability.

I like that. Octopuses, I've been told it's not Octopi, seem to be having a moment.

You know, in film and TV and books. They do have big heads, but I guess

the legs are the real engines powering them through the ocean. So is this about finally finding a way

for companies to reduce hierarchy once and for all and create autonomous but still connected teams

like those legs?

So it might be. It's definitely about breaking down bureaucracy, and it's about an obsessive

focus on what really matters, which is customer needs. So that's the advice of Jana Werner,

Executive and Residence of Enterprise Strategy at Amazon Web Services, and co-author with Phil

Lebrun of the new HBR article,

Become an Octopus Organization, as well as the new book, The Octopus Organization,

...