Phil Le-Brun

Biography

Phil Le-Brun leads the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Executives in Residence, a team of former business and public sector leaders who mentor and guide Fortune 500 executives on their journeys to create more adaptable organisations. A former corporate VP and International CIO at McDonald's Corporation, Phil co-led the consolidation and modernisation of technology across 38,000 restaurants in 120 countries. He is also the co-author of the acclaimed The Octopus Organization, an exploration of the challenges of transformation and how to create organisations that are agile and AI-ready.

Examining how organisations can operate with greater agility and adaptability, Phil explores Subtraction as Competitive Advantage. He asks what successful leaders can or should remove, from oversight to processes, rather than add in order to help their people move faster. He addresses governance structures and meeting cultures and what an organisation's decision-making reveals about who is genuinely committed versus those merely contributing opinions. He also shares his lessons from ‘What 50+ Fortune 500 Transformations Taught Me’, exploring why companies spend millions on cloud, AI and digital tools yet see little real organisational change, and why the infrastructure that is actually broken is behavioural, not technical.

Phil is the co-author, with Jana Werner, of The Octopus Organization: A Guide to Thriving in a World of Continuous Transformation. In the international award-winning book, he and Jana look at why, despite knowing the value of innovation and adaptability, so many organisations struggle to move away from bureaucracy and imbedded processes. He looks at how organisations can emulate the octopus – intelligent, resilience, adaptable, and with tentacles that operate both independently and towards shared goals. Phil also co-leads the re:Imagine - Turning AI into Value initiative, drawing on extensive research and conversations with executives across four continents and internal studies tracking thousands of practitioners' use of AI to examine what separates organisations creating genuine value from AI from those still at the adoption stage.

With many examples from organisations around the world, Phil looks at concepts like the Tin Man in the Room, examining the cause and effect of treating organisations like machines with broken parts and why transformation failure rates have remained static for decades. He considers how to decentralise decision-making in a way that outperforms top-down, how to create value through AI instead of just more processes, and looks at the curiosity and adaptability needed to succeed in the AI age. Phil regularly appears in the Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Forbes, Fast Company, The Economist and the Financial Times, and he is a member of the Forbes Technology Council.