Chaos Management: Do Fewer Rules Make For Better Workplaces?

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Thanks for downloading this episode of the Bottom Line Podcast with extra material in it we couldn't squeeze into the radio version. Hello, welcome back. And today we have a topic inspired by political events this year because our theme is chaos. Chaos as a management style. Now there's been a lot of chaos around, and an interesting question is whether sometimes it's actually a good thing. I'm going to offer a couple of examples of chaos.

Donald Trump's tariff policy. It's left most of us unable to keep up. The tariffs change weekly, up, down, shake them all about. Who knows what the policy is? I'm not suggesting there is some genius strategy behind it all. It probably doesn't work for business. But does it work for President Trump to do it that way? Or take Elon Musk and his management style. You can think about his work at Doge causing chaotic mayhem in US government departments.

Do we think that achieved anything? Do his unpredictable tweets and sudden shake ups in his own companies achieve anything? Now, these are examples that prompted the question today of the merits of chaos. Obviously, if you don't like Messrs Trump and Musk, you'll just say chaos is bad. But I think I'm right in saying chaos is pretty commonplace in organizations, especially one would have to say in startups.

And if I reframe the question the other way round, is tidy management, organized management, is that effective? I think it sounds quite arguable. Sometimes you get the best out of a mess. Just don't worry about the papers spilling off the desk. Ignore those and just get things done.

So this might just be a very messy discussion, but it does get us into management styles, and we have three guests to help us who have their own views. on how to run a business. First up is Simon Dixon. He's with me in the studio here. Founder, chief executive of Hat Mill. It is a consultancy business, supply chain and logistics consultancy, based in Harrogate in North Yorkshire. Simon, first question How tidy is your deck?

Um, not particularly. I have organized piles of things, but th a lot of that stuff's been there a little while and probably needs a bit of a sort. But you probably can find things when you want to on your desk, can't you? Yes, yes, yeah. A bit like a teenager's bedroom floor. Right. Tell us what the company, Hat Mill, what does that do? Um so we help our clients solve their most complex challenges, such as designing and opening new distribution centres.

or implementing warehouse automation, those sort of uh technical challenges that that businesses often face and don't have the capability or capacity to do internally. We work with businesses such as Asda, Greg's, Lego, DiAgio, uh, Warbitons. So you're a white collar business. It's not that you're doing the logistics, you're advising people on how to do

Now I think you'll probably push back at the word chaos, but you have a kind of chaos style in the management of your company. Yes. We have uh what we believe is probably the minimum number of rules and policies that we can get away with.

to give the team the autonomy and the freedom to use their judgment at any point in time to make the best decisions. Because taking your point around the amount of chaos that goes on in the world We believe it's impossible to legislate for everything that can come at us, and therefore why should you even try? create an environment that allows maximum flexibility to take on the chin, whatever whatever comes your way. Right. So in practice that means

Job descriptions pretty flexible? Um zero job descriptions. So no one has a job description, no one has a job title. Um there is no hierarchy, there are no promotions or demotions.

But how do people know what to do when they come in in the morning it happened? Um it's down to them to figure it out. Now obviously that's you know, the people don't turn up every morning and go, you know, what the hell should I do today? But It is for them to observe, see what's going on in the organisation, talk to their colleagues.

No, some of them will be working on client projects, so it's fairly clear what needs to be done in terms of moving the project forward. If you're not on a client project at that moment in time, it's down to you to observe and as as you know, a an old boss of mine you say, listen to the river. and and see see what you need to do that day to improve the position of the organisation.

Fascinating. Well look we'll come to whether whether it works for you, but don't give us the answer to that yet, um Simon. Um next up let me introduce Erin Mayer, professor at the business school INSIAD, co-author of a book called No Rules Rules. A book she wrote with the founder and former chief executive of Netflix, Reed Hastings. Um and Erin. First of all, your desk. Are you a tidy person with a spotless desk, no papers, or is it a bit messy? Oh my gosh. I Hey master.

Yes, my desk is very, very tidy. I can't think if there's any mess on it. All right. But you wrote a book. Opposite of Simon. Right. You wrote you were co-authored the book, No Rules Rules. Tell us what the thesis of the book is and how that relates to our kind of discussion about chaos. Yeah, and it's actually fascinating building on what Simon was saying. Uh so this is a book that I wrote, as you said, with Reed Hastings who was the

the founder and now chairman of Netflix, and he actually talks about managing on the edge of chaos. So he he embraces that word fully. Um and his experience uh was that with his first company before Netflix that at the beginning when the company was just small. It worked as you said, like in an entrepreneurial fashion, so there were no

like rules or processes telling people what they could and couldn't do, or all the things Simon was talking about. There were no job descriptions, there were no processes telling you who you had to get approval from to spend money or make decisions. But then of course as the company grew,

people started to take advantage of the freedom that were allotted to them and some people did stupid stuff, right? So like they would start flying first class because there was no travel policy, or bringing the dog to work who chews a hole in the conference room carpet because there's no rule saying that you can't.

So then uh Reed decided that he was gonna need to work with human resources to like control things a little around here. And they created an employee handbook and that had of course all of the

the rules and processes and control mechanisms that we have in almost every, you know, medium to large organization telling people what they could and couldn't do on a daily basis. But then What happened is that although that did actually increase financial um efficiency in the organization, and it did actually reduce error.

It also led the most creative, high performing, fresh thinking employees to leave the company because people like that usually wanna to work in a place where they can run a little bit free. So because of that, the company stopped innovating and Reed had to sell the organization. So when he opened up Netflix, his goal was to create an environment that gave like unprecedented amounts of freedom.

to their employees even as the company ran large. And you know, the things that Simon was talking about and then many, many more things. That we have almost at every company, like vacation policies or uh travel policies. I mean you don't find any of that stuff at Netflix. So that's sort of the deal behind it. Absolutely fascinating. Well look let me introduce my third guest and that's Jesper Broden. It's the outgoing chief executive of Inca Group.

However, the Really you should think of him as the chief executive of IKEA. And Jesper, it's great to have you o on the bottom line. Can you just tell us a bit about the structure of IKEA before we get into chaos?'Cause it is it looks to me quite messy. It is actually a product of an entrepreneur and As you know entrepreneurs Have ideas and follow their enthusiasm and instinct and so on, and that leads you to different directions. So you can say.

Part of Ikea structure is actually built in order to enable both resilience and longevity, but also to enable that w we can do new things. So it's not um Simplistic organisation. It's more like a system, really. Yeah, but you're the chief executive of most of the retail operations, but you're not the kind of supply chain boss as I understand it. That's a a sort of different piece of the enterprise. Like you say, there there are different uh focuses of the IKEA universe, if I say

And uh the emphasis in the group that I'm leading today is the operational part, including the retail markets, logistics, uh, digital and more. Yeah. Now you're stepping out of this position. When are you going? Why are you going? What's your next step? So my last day of work is on the 28th of February and I'm handing over my CEO role a little bit in advance there and then supporting my successor for a couple of months as well.

So 30 years with the company, 8 years as a CEO and I thought it was a good timing to say I've done what I come to do. It's been a wonderful ride. But I'm also being 57 years old I thought there was something maybe waiting for me around the corner So I'm curiously opening a new chapter in my life Okay, well we're excited to have you here at that turning point. Now let's talk about chaos and your experience of it at IKEEN.

Is it chaotic? Yeah, I think so at times. You know, it's intra it's an interesting concept. I guess chaos means Disorder and confusion. Somebody told me, I think it was in Davos in January. To a certain extent, the world is in more chaos now. And the reason being, we have left one world order, we haven't yet established a new world order. And the periods like that, I think in the world are a bit more chaotic. but also great from an opportunity perspective. I think in IKEA, if I look at it,

I will disappoint you now. We actually do have some policies and rules. I don't think we spend too many hours of the week worrying about that, but it's good to have some sort of framework, of course, and there are some lines that we don't want to cross being in uh forty countries plus uh hundred seventy thousand employees, etcetera.

But I think when I asked the founder of IKEA, I used to work as assistant for him for many years and I asked him out of the twenty plus mandatory policies in IKEA, w which one uh It's the most important. And he cited, not even one of them, he said, there is only one real policy in IKEA, and that's that you have to make mistakes. So in a way, we built in, if you like,

Entrepreneurship as the most important essence of what we try to be. Then of course you have a couple of guidelines and rail lines after.

To respect that going on. Yeah, absolutely fascinating. Look, all companies are trying to get this balance right, find the sweet spot between bureaucracy, formal processes, and letting people do stuff and get on with it and be decisive and make decisions for themselves and that's really, I suppose, the subject we're talking about today. Simon, you describe your company with um Very few rules and processes. Does it work for you?

Yeah, absolutely. And uh we've been recognised twice in the last three years as the number one great place to work by best workplaces. And it matches some of the things that Arian was saying around, you know, we don't have a travel policy. um, things like that. You know, we we allow people to make a judgment. And just to bring that into reality, if you have a travel policy that says, you know, you can only spend seventy five pounds a night on a hotel

Well that that might be fine if you're staying in I don't I need to be careful of the town I pick now, but um yeah, off season in Scarborough. But it's not very useful if you want to stay in central London during fashion week.

So you need to allow t teams to make the judgment based on the circumstances that they face and you know all the chaos that that you encounter. It's difficult to legislate for for everything that uh that people will face in the team, so why bother trying? But Erin, you described it'cause Companies do invent bureaucracy and processes and normally out of a problem, so a dog chews the carpet.

And then you have a policy on dogs. So someone will draft a page of A four on when it's acceptable to have a dog, what the dogs can be, how the dogs must behave. I mean that's how companies evolve. They basically do just invent this stuff, don't they? It's i irrepressible. Yeah. Well I think I wanna to make a little bit of a point here, which is that

So we were talking to Jasper earlier and of course he works for IKEA. It's a retail company with I guess warehouses and manufacturing. Netflix is a creative company. So innovation, they're all about innovation.

So I did this huge research project at Netflix. I interviewed, you know, hundreds of their employees. I spent a huge amount of time with Reed Hastings trying to figure out what it was about this very unusual and disruptive organizational culture managing on the edge of chaos that was leading to their their success.

that other companies could learn from. And I think my biggest learning from that was to recognize that the vast majority of companies today are operating with an industrial era hangover. And what I mean by that is that during the industrial era, of course, we were all obsessed. with error elimination, replicability, and consistency. And if you are leading a manufacturing plant today or you are working in a safety critical industry, I mean those are still your goal.

But of course, in a growing number of organizations and industries today, the biggest risk is no longer making a mistake. or as as Jasper was was talking about, or losing out on a little bit of efficiency. The biggest risk is now not thinking freshly enough or being flexible or agile enough. so that the organization becomes irrelevant. So I just wanted to bring that up there because it's not like you can just say, oh well this bureaucracy is here for stupid reasons. It's here for a reason.

It's just that we have to choose like when do we prefer to prevent errors. And when do we prefer to let some like messiness into the system in order to get these kind of like creative or jazz conditions going? That is absolutely I I mean you've kind of almost concluded the discussion because that is obviously where you're going to end up, isn't it? You don't want chaos on a construction site. I mean that's obviously not gonna work for anybody's health safety Yeah.

Give us your view of what you've heard from these other two on this kind of distinctions of where it works, how it works. I must just agree with uh Aaron's point of view. It's an interesting time we live in. Things are speeding up. We have said that for ages, but they continue to speed up. But I think the biggest risk you can run as a leader

And running a company today is to miss the train, really. Whatever rules you need to have, that's not really the thing. It's about how do you actually stimulate uh creativity? How do you test and try? How do you uh build a culture of um of uh fearlessness into the future. And it reminds me of uh actually during you can see that from an opportunity point of view, from a crisis point of view.

During the pandemic, I remembered I think it was like month two or three into the pandemic, I had an interview with a gentleman who praised IKEA's way of responding to the pandemic. We were fast actually. And we we did a lot of good things. We did some mistakes too. And he said, How come I and me in my management uh so to say had been so effective in in taking all these decisions to get things right? And what I realized in that moment was that

there is something that I think beats any sort of policies and that is culture. In our case we we work deeply with values and cultures and that that means basically what happened in our case in the pandemic was that people felt empowered in a situation of crisis to do what they thought was right. That is the distinction. If you come to a krisis moment or an important inflation point where you need to develop. And if everybody is den focused on fear.

And wait for somebody, one person and so forth to be the voice. Of direction, then you will uh lose out. If you can breed a culture where people take initiatives and where you also feel safe. for for the times that you make a few mistakes. I think that would be very effective. Yeah, I I totally agree with Jesper and I think whilst we might be focusing here on uh an absence of rules, what is present in these organizations, and I might, you know, putting my boat out and speaking for those

You have to have a shared purpose amongst the team because that sort of provides the guidelines and the the the definition of the pitch that you're playing on, and you've then got freedom to go anywhere on that pitch.

Certainly at Hat Mill um we talk about bringing your whole self to work. So you don't have a work personality or a work ego. You bring yourself because actually you're you're interacting with real people, they're not the people they're trying to be when w when they're at work. And it requires a great deal of honesty. honesty with each other about when we're performing and you know when taking Aaron's point about people starting to book first class flights. Yeah.

Yeah, I know we haven't got a rule about that, but is that really the right thing to do? And and question each other's judgment with a great deal of honesty coming from the right place. Yeah, so culture as a substitute for a sort of written rule book. It's like a flexible constitution in a way, isn't it? Where you

you sort of rely on people understanding what the conventions and norms are and you hope that those norms are suitable. Um Jesper what tell us about banana cards. This is a an IKEA concept, but you'll have to explain it from the very beginning. So listen, I I think the the banana card is just a fun way of illustrating the importance of something very serious for us.

Which is about acting as an entrepreneur. I'd met a lot of people in my organization, a lot of leaders who spoke to the fear of making mistakes. Um As an encouragement in that, because I think you know when it comes to idéas, they are fragile and very often it's it's not that people burnt themselves making mistakes, it's actually something that stopped them before.

And I wanted to sort of drive through the company an engagement to ask people to do more mistakes and to ask them to act on their ideas, both because we needed to develop IKEA of the future, but also because I think individuals Who are driven by kreativity, curiosity. If you don't get to act on your ideas, something dies within you. So I take it seriously. So I issued a Go Bananas card, which is basically a

Free card if you like. If you make a mistake. You have me actually already cosign for your mistake. Whatever that mistake is. So if you feel a bit lonely in that moment, you can apologize for your mistake and I've already cosigned it. So uh So hang on. So what is the card? It's a physical card?

And you It's a little bit of a card, yes. And you've signed it taking responsibility for the mistake that the person is about to make or is going to make Erin. Yeah, well actually it's super interesting because Maybe I'll take that a step further because Jasper uses the word mistake. One of the things that kept happening when I was doing my research at Netflix is that people would tell me about a project that they had tried out that had failed.

So, you know, we said earlier, okay, like a culture of innovation is intention with a culture of error prevention. Okay, so as Jesper was saying, we need to have a culture where people are trying a lot of things out. Some of them are failing, some of them are working, you know, but the failure leads to the success.

This guy's telling me about this project he ran and it failed at the end that you know he'd spent millions of dollars. And then I would say something like, Well, when you made that mistake, and every time I said that, they they would stop me. No, no, no, it wasn't a mistake. Mistake It was a failure but not a mistake. And I realized that in my mind the idea of mistakes and failures were synonymous.

But for them, it was like a mistake is something that you've done accidentally. Like you accidentally did something and it was a mistake. Versus a failure is something that you do with intention to try it out, do your best, and if it doesn't work, you fail and you learn from it.

And they actually use an image at Netflix. Maybe it's not quite as cute as the banana card, but I thought very interesting, which is that um often like When you join Netflix, your manager is likely to say to you, Well, you know, I'd like you to imagine that I'm giving you a a bag of betting chips, like you're at a casino.

So here's where we go back to Simon's kind of idea about autonomy, but it's up to you to decide where you put those chips. You know, you need to talk to a lot of people, but as your boss, I don't make the decision. You make these multimillion dollar decisions yourself. You place the chapter.

And then some of those are gonna fail and some of them are gonna work. And at the end of the year, you know, we're gonna look at what happened with your whole portfolio. And if all of them succeeded, that means you're not taking enough risk. And if all of them fail, then clearly you're not using good enough judgment. Right? So I just thought that was such an interesting way to kind of move away from this paradigm of thinking that

Failing is a mistake that needs to be avoided. And instead recognizing that our job is to try a lot of the thing things out. Some of them work, some of them fail, and we learn when it doesn't work, and that's all with intention. None of it is a mistake.

Yeah, I I love what Erin's just said. We we have uh a a a slight parallel I'm I'm gonna bring take home the uh the failing thing, but uh we have a thing called the advice process. So anyone is empowered to make any decision as long as you've consulted with those who have expertise in the matter.

or those who will be affected by that decision. Right. So And you do that and then you can you can go ahead and you but then you remain accountable for that decision and and it goes forward. So there are sort of noble failures and then there are mistakes and they're slightly, slightly different things.

Just but how do you stop a company with, you know, a couple of hundred thousand employees a an IKEA? How do you stop it? inventing stifling bureaucracy. Because I I mean you can try things like banana cards, but I can even imagine there being kind of a bureaucracy around your banana card. It's such a sort of human instinct as organizations grow and develop. How do you stop that? You're touching a very important point, I think.

It's a konstant diskover test and trial on my side. I met somebody a few years ago who actually had a big impact on me. A consultant into simplicity. The hedge will grow. You need to cut it from time to time. So I think bureaucracy is not something you deal with once. You have to constantly address it. I think the most important and impactful way actually is to stimulate the opposite, to stimulate entrepreneurship, celebrate.

failures, mistakes, but also of course successes. But it's true that in any growing big organization that I know of, you will run into time where there are eight to nine no sayers to a yes sayer. And you need to work the system against that. And you need to be, I think, an example as well as a leader to show that. you don't only speak about it but you actually actively pursue it. Yeah, it's really interesting because even as you talk, I'm thinking public sector organizations where I think

the avoidance of mistakes is a very a real premium quality in how the public sector runs. It's much harder in the public sector to get a start up mentality. But Erin, tell us about startups'cause I mean I've had friends working in startups. Every one of them has sounded not just chaotic, but dysfunctionally chaotic. And yet some of them work, some of them don't work. I just I think it'd be very hard. to to kind of impose a public sector ethos in those organisations and get anything done.

Yeah, I think there's a reason for this. So earlier on Jasper talked about the importance of empowerment and Simon talked about the importance of having like a an environment where there's a lot of psychological safety and really honest feedback going on. But I think we were kind of missing I mean, from my perspective, like the the key to this, which is okay, so

We'll go back to the story about Reed. When he started Netflix, he wanted to create this an organization that gave people unprecedented amounts of freedom. But he also, of course, had concerns. Like as the company grows into hundreds and thousands of people, if you don't put in place these control mechanisms that we have in almost every company, the the organization is likely to descend into chaos.

not manage on the edge of chaos. And of course, you know, that's what not what we want. So he thought about it and he came up with uh this kind of experiment. And the experiment was, well look, in most organizations Most of the control mechanisms that we put in place are there to deal with the average or below average employees.

But usually your your top performers with the right skills, the right attitude, the right collaboration. I mean those people, they don't need to be controlled so So what he tried to do was to create an organization that had a lot of what they call talent density, which means a lot less employees, but just really good employees. and not just the right skills but also with the right attitude and the right ability to kind of like speak up honestly.

And the idea was then if you could get those kinds of conditions going, then of course you could give people a lot more freedom. And I just wanna to say one thing about this word empowerment. I mean Okay, I'm fifty four. I entered the work environment thirty years ago.

And when I entered the work environment, all companies were talking about empowerment, right? Like that was the big buzzword. How can we get this going? And now here we are, 30 years later, all companies are talking about empowerment. And I think the reason I mean like the reason that most companies

talk a lot about empowerment but but they never get it going is because they don't couple the idea of empowerment with talent density. I mean I'm sorry to say it but if you have poor performing employees Employees where if they told you they were leaving the company that you would be relieved or excited they were going. I mean, don't empower those employees. Okay, well you well drive I mean they will drive your company off a cliff.

But if you get really good employees and you get a really great culture of collaboration going, then you can have like huge amounts of empowerment. And really, you know, as the manager kind of set context and culture and let everybody else get things done. Yeah. I think there's a really interesting point there about Aaron in terms of poor performing employees. are disenfranchised generally from the company as an employer. What we talk about is blurring the line between employee and employer.

So any decision you're making you're taking on the basis of what does the typical employee think of this and what they have to be they have to be good to to to have that responsibility, don't they? Yes. And and therefore the selection and you know the checks and balances as people enter the organisation are crucial.

to make sure that you're not bringing in people with, you know, excessively large egos and things like that that would require the hierarchy and won't be able able to operate in that way. Really fascinating what people are really describing what you're all d really describing is a kind of organized case.

Structured chaos. I want to go round the table and ask you all what you think of إِلَنْ مَرْ Donald Trump. I kind of motivated, was inspired for this topic by watching global leaders who appear to have a kind of element of chaos merchant about them. I mean Simon, what's your impression? Put aside if you can, the politics. But it's just as a sort of management style. What do you feel about it? I think it's difficult to understand what chaos merchants are trying to achieve.

And therefore it's difficult to get people to align behind it because it I don't know what they're aligning behind, because there isn't a clear message, there isn't a clear shared purpose. Because you are flip flopping from one thing to another and therefore If you want people to follow that, how do they justify their belief in following you?

if they have to change their mind yeah week on week in order to stay aligned with the leader. So I d I don't get it. Yeah, okay. That's a very interesting perspective and we've mentioned culture. It's not Everybody does everything or anything. It is aligned in their kind of mindset. So they're getting things done. Erin, your kind of view of the sort of Leaders with a sort of chaotic bend. Yeah, well, I think it's nice to think about this kind of image of like a jazz band versus an orchestra.

So going back to my point about the industrial era, like let's say you are Boeing and you are creating airplanes. Now in this case, of course, we want to manage our organization like an orchestra. Synchronicity, precision, perfection, right? And we need to make sure that every product that's going out on the line is perfect because of course a mistake will lead to death, right?

But then there are so many other areas, industries, and in a gr it's growing, of course, because as the world is changing more quickly, we need to be able to invent more quickly, we need to be more agile and able to change direction as things change around us. I like the idea of the jazz band where instead of like the orchestra conductor trying to kind of like get everyone doing everything in the exactly the right way, that you set the conditions for the music to happen.

And then you get really good musicians there. And then with these conditions, they create beautiful music. Now I'm not gonna comment. whether whether Trump is creating beautiful music or not. But I do think that one of the things that has been so kind of startling about this, having this type of management in our government. is that of course we think of the government as being there to protect people from danger and of course this type of jazz strategy is more dangerous.

So I just wanted to bring that out there again that I don't think that this idea of managing on the edge of chaos can be thought of as something we can do everywhere. We really need to think carefully, even in one company, like I work with Michelin Tires, right? Okay, in your manufacturing plans. You want to follow the lessons of the industrial era. Here you're an orchestra. Over here, you're trying to come up with fabulous new ways of creating tires. Here, be a jazz band.

Right. And uh yeah, I hope we got a little bit of both of that. It's a point very well made. I want you, Jasper, to uh to comment on the politics. I'm sure as a sort of chief executive of IKEA you'll be very reluctant to do so. I want to talk about jazz. I love the jazz. Actually, I use it quite often. I love it. I think the things that I think is important from a leadership perspective, the way I see it, if I start by saying I think the way I've been brought up...

And the way I believe in leadership: you need to be clear to yourself and to your organisation and the world: what is your purpose, what are the values that are guiding you, and then whatever that is, you're um clear on that. I think it's important as a leader to understand. Your own Psychology, I think it's important. And I this is a conversation I have with myself sometimes. What is the difference between Impulse and being spontaneous. Impulse is very often driven by.

anxiety or or uh hidden things within yourself whereas being spontaneous is about being creative and it normally leads you in uh different directions. Um and IKEA we have made a conscious choice which I love long time ago to be optimistic. So it's not like an attitude. It's actually a choice that we made to be optimistic.

That comes, I think, from a deep belief that even though we do need pessimists, and being a deep optimist myself, I do need to surround myself with people who have an opportunity to have a more critical view on things than I normally have.

But the thing is, it's only optimistic dreamers who change the world because they engage while pessimist is more in the audience and can be needed so to say so therefore that's the I love the way this conversation it starts with this word chaos, which is a controversial way of framing it really, but we've

got into all sorts of areas. I think the individual personality thing does matter. We had Erin, you're very tidy in the way you conduct your kind of personal management of your desk space. Um Simon you're a little bit untidier. I didn't ask you Jesper whether you're tidy. I'm imagining you are quite tidy. I was w wondering if you had forgotten it or if you're gonna get to it. And the funny thing I actually don't have a desk uh today, so I'm very mobile in my work.

But if you look at my desktop, it's wonderfully tidy. At least I see some sort of pattern when I look at it Let us leave it there. What an interesting conversation about management styles in public sector startups, growing businesses, big businesses, um real challenges for the bosses. Let me thank my guests, Simon Dixon. running the consultancy. Hat mill Erin Mayer, co author of No Rules Rules.

And Jesper Broden, the outgoing chief executive of IKEA. Thanks to them, the podcast was produced by Sally Abrahams and Phoebe Keane. It was presented by me, Evan Davis, and is a BBC long form audio production for Radio 4. If your podcast provider allows it, do review the show, it helps others find out about it. Hörni, Pedro, din träning börjar om en kvart och Lille Såg och älsars er träning börja om 20. Det hinner vi om vi bara raska på lite. Eller hur? Sa du?

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