The Octopus Organization: A Guide to Thriving in a World of Continuous Transformation

Drive lasting change with a new, nimbler organization focused on continuous change.

Our organizations are stuck. We talk about agility but find ourselves bogged down in bureaucracy. We aspire to innovate but run into systems built to prevent mistakes, not spark breakthroughs. We need to learn and adapt, but we're operating with an outdated playbook built for efficiency and control. And our attempts to fix all this—by pouring trillions into huge, top-down transformations—make the problems worse.

But there is a better way: Building an Octopus Organization.

One of nature's most intelligent and curious creatures, the octopus is everything your organization needs to be: smart, endlessly adaptable, and highly resilient. Its eight tentacles work in concert, but each can also think for itself. This book shows how to achieve the same balance of cohesion and autonomy and to guide your organization toward a living, breathing system—one that learns, adapts, and thrives by tapping into the distributed intelligence of its people.

Drawing on their experience at companies such as Amazon and McDonald's and work with hundreds of global companies, AWS executives Phil Le-Brun and Jana Werner show you how to break away from the broken model of transformation and embrace continuous change. They share thirty-six "antipatterns"—conditioned habits—that keep us stuck and, in their place, provide "levers" that create meaningful improvement in months, not years.

The Octopus Organization is your guide to moving beyond rigid structures and nurturing the living, adaptable organization you aspire to create, and be a part of.

Phil Le-Brun is an enterprise strategist at Amazon Web Services and a former corporate VP and international CIO at McDonald's Corporation. At McDonald's he co-led the consolidation and modernization of technology across thirty-eight thousand restaurants globally. In his current role, Phil engages with Fortune 500 executives and their teams and with public-sector customers to mentor, advise, and guide them on their journeys to become more adaptable organizations. He is a sought-after speaker and has been featured in Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian.

Jana Werner is an enterprise strategist at Amazon Web Services, where she guides the executive teams of Fortune 500 companies in building adaptive customer-centric organizations. Her insights are forged from a career at the intersection of business strategy and technology: leading major digital transformations in financial services, guiding and scaling tech startups to growth and acquisition, and advising on complex global change at DHL. Her academic background in uncertainty dynamics grounds her practical advice for leaders navigating complex environments and building resilient organizations.