'Drown in bureaucracy' | CEO shares controversial leadership philosophy, should you follow?

CEO Greg Jackson, who helms the UK-start-up Octopus Energy, recently caused a stir by sharing his controversial views on leadership in an interview with the BBC.

Jackson, whose firm employs around 1,200 employees and has a current valuation of over £1.4billion, stated that segregation into departments such as HR and IT doesn’t exist at the challenger green energy company, and that such concepts only serve to "infantilise" employees and "drown creative people in process and bureaucracy".

The company has been in operation since 2015, and in that time, Jackson has drastically moved away from what he calls "command and control", top-down management structures. He instead puts the onus on line managers and on all individuals to handle any issues that may crop up.

Jackson told the BBC that he believes his managers should take personal responsibility for these elements, with the aid of good training, rather than "shelving responsibility to a third party”.