Transforming Organizational Structure: A Shift to Decentralization

Speaker 2
We have to take a quick break, but when we come back, we'll get into how BookTok is influencing the book business. This episode
Speaker 3
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Speaker 2
We're back. I always joke that Decoder is at its heart a podcast about org charts. You're describing a massive org chart change, right? And my theory is that what tool does a CEO have to solve problems? The first one is the org chart. And you come into this huge problem and you upend the org chart. You decentralize your org chart. How is the company structured now? It
Speaker 1
is very decentralized. We do most of our sort of heavy lifting from a merchant perspective out in the stores. We are continuing to unnecessarily invest in the things that support the stores. So we've probably got more infrastructure centrally to do that. The store development teams, the construction guys do all of the refurbishments and new store build-outs, many more of those, and a lot of investment in IT and logistics. But otherwise, we're very light touch. All of our book buying is done by essentially one person with two assistants, and that was a team probably of 40 or 50 before, because that's all we need to do centrally. The rest is all done out in the stores. How many direct reports do you have now? Oh, I'm very un-house trained as a corporate person. I had my own business for a very, very long time. And I still run this one in the same way that I do my own. And I have a lot of people who I speak to a lot, but fairly informally. And I think it's all about conversation, constant engagement. And I think everybody's overlapping. I see our org chart is not some sort of hierarchical structure. I think it's something much more like a solar system.
Speaker 2
Are you the sun? No,
Speaker 1
I'm just one of these sort of orbiting circles which sort of overlap with others. And you do need somebody in the middle, and that is, if I play any role, which is to constantly articulate that this is what we're doing to banish hierarchy. Because I think hierarchy is the thing that constantly undermines us. Because with hierarchy, there comes a lot of ego and a lot of desire either to take the praise and benefit for whatever is being done, to offload the cause for anything that is going wrong, rather than collectively dealing with things. So I think it's changing that ethos. And we've changed from being a very masculine company to being one that's probably much more feminine now. And I don't know whether that's partly in reflection of that sort of flattening of the organizational structure.

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