The Octopus Organization.
The book confirms our experience: decentralized structures and distributed intelligence turn sluggish tankers into agile octopuses. From its antipattern we built five Octopus principles — they resolve the 42 blockages we see in practice.
Eight topics, one thread.
Preliminary chapter overview — final titles to be confirmed.
- Why tankers fail — the biological comparison
- Distributed intelligence over central control
- Mandate over command — how ownership takes hold
- Measuring impact — outcomes over activity
- Experiment culture — learning fast over planning slow
- Routine as the foundation for innovation
- Antipatterns — blockages that sabotage every transformation
- Implementation — the path from tanker to octopus
Eight arms, one direction.
"The octopus organization isn't hierarchy-free — it's hierarchy-aware. It knows which decisions need to be made centrally and which don't. It creates clarity on the few things that unite everyone — and room on everything else."
Phil Le-Brun & Jana Werner.
Phil Le-Brun is Director of Enterprise Strategy at AWS, previously a long-time executive at McDonald's. Jana Werner consults on transformation programmes in the Harvard Business Review orbit. At The Octopus Principle we picked up their antipattern work and translated it into a concrete coaching method with five POWER principles and 42 blockages.
POWER on one page — free.
Want a fast start before the book? Drop your email and grab our POWER field guide as a PDF: the five principles, each with one question that shows where it's stuck for you.
Get the book.
- Amazon DE (Kindle / Print)
- Amazon.com (English)
- Publisher — TBA
- Bookstore on request