Jana Werner

Biography

Jana Werner is an Executive in Residence at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where she advises executive teams at Fortune 500 companies on technology adoption, innovation and change. Her insights come from a career at the intersection of business strategy and technology, including leading digital transformations in financial services, scaling tech startups to growth and acquisition, and advising on complex global change initiatives at DHL. She is also the co-author of the acclaimed book The Octopus Organization in which she considers how to adapt businesses for a rapidly and constantly changing world.

Jana explores how organisations can move beyond rigid structures to build living, adaptive systems. She explains the Permission Paradox, an analysis of why organisations optimised for control systematically fail to spot the people who could help them succeed, and why AI is making that cost impossible to hide. She also considers Clarity, Ownership and Curiosity as foundational traits, asking how organisations can challenge permission-based cultures in order to be curious when skills are expiring in months rather than decades. Jana also addresses the Great AI Resignation, looking at why organisations' most capable people leave, not for more money, but for more agency, and how traditional management structures are pushing talent to seek opportunities elsewhere. 

With her AWS colleague Phil Le-Brun, Jana is the co-author of The Octopus Organization: A Guide to Thriving in a World of Continuous Transformation. The international award-winning book analyses why, despite often knowing the keys to innovation and adaptation, organisations fail to transform. Jana and Phil identify key ‘antipatterns’ that stifle vital change, and consider how to tackle them so that an organisation can be more 'octopus-like', with individual, autonomous tentacles that can also operate in concert when needed. Jana also serves as editor-in-chief of re:Imagine - Turning AI into Value, a report drawing on extensive international research and internal studies monitoring thousands of practitioners' use of AI, to examine what separates organisations creating genuine value from AI from those stuck at the adoption stage. 

From the challenges to transformation to the need to decentralise decision-making, Jana explores the vital issues all organisations are facing. With realistic frameworks and ideas, she also look at value creation through AI, and the skills needed for an AI world, including curiosity and comfort with ambiguity, and how leaders themselves are being reshaped by AI's emergence. With a background in uncertainty dynamics, Jana delivers practical advice for leaders navigating complex, rapidly changing environments and building resilient organisations. She is a frequent podcast guest on leadership and organisational change, has guest lectured at institutions including Oxford, the London School of Economics and Hong Kong University, and is a member of the Forbes Technology Council. Her work has been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, Inc, The Economist and the Financial Times.