The Tin Man Model of Running a Company Is Rusty
About this episode
Phil Le-Brun and Jana Werner discuss the limitations of traditional corporate models and advocate for a more agile approach to business inspired by the octopus.
Phil Le-Brun and Jana Werner are enterprise strategists at Amazon Web Services, based in London. Phil was previously a corporate VP and international CIO at McDonalds. Jana was formerly at DHL and studied uncertainty dynamics in academia. They are authors of The Octopus Organization: A Guide to Thriving in a World of Continuous Transformation published by Harvard Business Review Press. Octopus’s are nimble and amazing, as anybody who has watched the 2020 Oscar-winning documentary My Octopus Teacher will verify. In contrast, the Tin Man model we know from The Wizard of Oz needs constant oil and is too rusty and rigid to function well on its own for long. This episode’s guests lean into the Octopus model, which is about earning trust and evading, in this case, the enemy within ourselves when it comes to not admitting mistakes and quickly learning from them. The value of a strong feedback loop, creating an technology infrastructure that is “thin” and allows for freedom, and not chasing metrics that prevent you from learning from anecdotal evidence of where change is necessary: those are among the topics that lively conversation pursues. A final key point the authors make is that at…
People in this episode
Guests: Phil Le-Brun, Jana Werner
Topics covered
- business strategy
- organizational change
- feedback loops
- technology infrastructure
- executive learning
- innovation
Keywords
- Tin Man model
- Octopus model
- trust
- learning from mistakes
- metrics
- human capabilities
- continuous transformation
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Amazon Web Services, McDonalds, DHL, Harvard Business Review Press
Books & works: The Octopus Organization: A Guide to Thriving in a World of Continuous Transformation, My Octopus Teacher, Real Transformations: Business Change That Works from the Inside Out
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