Structured Autonomy with Paul Souren

Paul Souren spent sixteen years at Roche. The lesson that stuck wasn't how to dominate as market leader — it was how to reinvent the company when a patent cliff erased the products that built it. Overnight, Roche entered neuroscience, hemophilia, and immunotherapy as the new kid on the block, not the eight-hundred-pound gorilla.

Paul unpacks the real difference between change and transformation — incremental improvement versus turning the caterpillar into the butterfly — and his "playground" model of structured autonomy: give people the guardrails and the why, then let them own the how.

He's direct on the hard parts — why empowerment is meaningless without accountability, why people fear the power they're handed, and how to move the person who says yes in the room and no in their head.