The power of independence in an era shaped by complexity and AI
Two months after leading Magnetic back to independent ownership, CEO Jenny Burns outlines why independent thinking, strong culture and empowered people matter more than ever for professional services firms in an era shaped by complexity, automation and artificial intelligence.
For a long time, I didn’t fully understand what was driving many of the decisions I was making in my career. I could explain them rationally afterwards, but the instinct usually came first. It’s only more recently that I’ve realised there has been one consistent thread running through all of it: Independence.
Not in a dramatic or rebellious sense. More in the quieter idea of wanting to build my own path, make decisions for myself and create something that genuinely reflects how I think and want to operate. When I look back now, that driver has been there since I was young, even before I had the language to properly describe it.
It was there when I left university after four months of studying maths because I knew sitting in lectures wasn’t how I was going to learn what I needed. It was there in my early career when I found myself much more interested in understanding how businesses actually worked than simply following a conventional route through them.
And it’s there now as Magnetic enters a new chapter back in independent ownership.
What I’ve come to realise is that independence isn’t just personally motivating for me. I increasingly believe it creates better businesses too.
Agility starts with clarity
That belief has only strengthened after spending years working in and around large organisations. Many of them were filled with intelligent people, strong brands and significant investment yet still struggled to move forward with any real pace.
The frustrating part was that the capability was usually there. The issue wasn’t so much a lack of talent (the opposite if anything), it was that the environment made it difficult for people to operate at their best.
That matters more than ever now because we are operating in an environment where technology is changing the way entire industries operate and subsequently what customers expect. Yet so many respond to that uncertainty by becoming heavier operationally, introducing more layers of governance and slowing decision-making down further.
And in trying to create certainty, they often lose adaptability.
We see the consequences of that all the time in our work. Organisations rarely come to us because they lack talent or ambition. More often, they’re stuck. Stuck between competing priorities, trying to navigate uncertainty or simply knowing something needs to change but not quite seeing where to start.
Helping organisations get unstuck and moving again has become a big part of what we do. Not by adding more process, but by bringing clarity to the challenge, creating space for different perspectives and helping teams move from discussion to action.
For me, independence changes that dynamic because independent businesses tend to stay much closer to their thinking, people and the reality of the challenges they’re trying to solve. Decisions happen nearer to the work itself rather than disappearing into layers of approvals and competing stakeholder agendas, which creates a very different kind of energy inside the business.
And that’s where I think agility is often misunderstood. Real agility isn’t rushing decisions or moving fast for the sake of appearance, in my experience, it comes from clarity. Clarity around what you believe in, clarity around what matters commercially and culturally, and clarity around the kind of business you actually want to build.
Once you have that clarity, momentum becomes much easier to create because people spend less time navigating internal complexity and more time focused on moving things forward.
Here’s to the people
When I strip it all back, almost everything I believe about business still comes down to people.
That feels particularly important right now as we’re seemingly entering the period of automation and AI. Both will absolutely shape the future of business and rightly so. But I also think there’s a risk in assuming technology alone solves the hardest business problems because so many of the challenges businesses face aren’t purely technical. They’re often questions around leadership and judgement, where there isn’t necessarily a perfectly obvious answer.
What consistently makes the difference is the quality of thinking around the table and the ability to bring together individuals with different perspectives and ways of approaching problems. When you get that combination right, the quality of ideas changes noticeably because people challenge each other constructively and see opportunities or risks that others would miss on their own.
In many cases, independent businesses are naturally better designed for that because they can protect culture more intentionally and avoid some of the structural distance that often appears as organisations scale.
Now that doesn’t mean independence is easy because it absolutely comes with pressure. Freedom and responsibility are closely connected and there’s nowhere to hide from difficult decisions when the accountability sits directly with you. I’d be lying if I said there weren’t moments where the uncertainty feels very real and where the weight of ownership is impossible to ignore.
But even with that pressure, it’s still worth it, because there’s something incredibly powerful about building a business that feels genuinely aligned with what you value and how you want to operate. A business where people are trusted and the decisions are made with real conviction.
And I suspect more business leaders are beginning to search for that feeling themselves. Not necessarily independence in a literal ownership sense, but independence in thinking, decision-making and culture at a time when many businesses are going the opposite direction.
So, here’s to the ones not afraid to strike out from the beaten path. I promise you won’t regret it.
