What do you think?
Rate this book
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 We need to learn and adapt, but we're operating with an outdated playbook built for efficiency and control.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 Building an Octopus Organization.
One of nature's most intelligent and curious creatures, the octopus is everything your organization needs to 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.
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 We need to learn and adapt, but we're operating with an outdated playbook built for efficiency and control.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 Building an Octopus Organization.
One of nature's most intelligent and curious creatures, the octopus is everything your organization needs to 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.
324 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 16, 2025
52 people are currently reading
244 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 10, 2025
As someone who works in the change management and transformation space, I found this book excellent. The authors center the content around three core themes—clarity, ownership, and curiosity—and break each one down into practical, digestible pieces. I especially appreciated the short chapters, which stand on their own yet weave together a cohesive narrative.
Even though I initially received a digital advance copy through NetGalley, I pre-ordered a physical version and immediately began highlighting, dog-earing pages, and scribbling in the margins. Each chapter ends with a QR code linking to additional resources and a helpful “map” pointing to complementary sections throughout the book.
The conclusion is particularly strong, tying the concepts together into an actionable plan for leaders. The included templates and action steps offer a useful starting framework, especially given how common it is for organizations to identify their bad habits and then try to fix everything at once—a sure path to failure.
As I read the book, I kept thinking about how these ideas apply directly to leaders: the need for clarity of purpose, ownership of actions, and curiosity to experiment and adapt. With the pace of change accelerating, building resilience and adaptability is more important than ever. While I’ll certainly be thinking about how to apply this framework to the organization I support as well as my personal development goals in 2026.
Overall, the authors do a great job blending theory, real-world examples, and storytelling without veering into name-dropping, which I really appreciated.
Even though I initially received a digital advance copy through NetGalley, I pre-ordered a physical version and immediately began highlighting, dog-earing pages, and scribbling in the margins. Each chapter ends with a QR code linking to additional resources and a helpful “map” pointing to complementary sections throughout the book.
The conclusion is particularly strong, tying the concepts together into an actionable plan for leaders. The included templates and action steps offer a useful starting framework, especially given how common it is for organizations to identify their bad habits and then try to fix everything at once—a sure path to failure.
As I read the book, I kept thinking about how these ideas apply directly to leaders: the need for clarity of purpose, ownership of actions, and curiosity to experiment and adapt. With the pace of change accelerating, building resilience and adaptability is more important than ever. While I’ll certainly be thinking about how to apply this framework to the organization I support as well as my personal development goals in 2026.
Overall, the authors do a great job blending theory, real-world examples, and storytelling without veering into name-dropping, which I really appreciated.
Displaying 1 of 1 review