Creating Clarity
Antipattern Cluster
Antipattern #1
Relying On Jargon
Clear language creates collective understanding and a shared purpose.
The Tin Man organization is a master of obfuscation. It is prone to using jargon, buzzwords, and complex acronyms (what Scott Galloway calls "Yogababble") to signal status, mask insecurity, or avoid making clear commitments. This creates a brittle, silent organization where only the "insiders" can communicate.
The Octopus, by contrast, operates on radical clarity, with simplicity of language. It understands that the goal of language is to accelerate understanding and inspire action.
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Our Recommended Reading List
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HBR Article: Does Your Office Have a Jargon Problem?
Book: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
TEDTalk: How your brain responds to stories — and why they’re crucial for leaders
YouTube Video: Let's Fix Corporate Jargon in the Workplace by David Burkus
Antipattern #2
Whiffing On Purpose Statements
An authentic, specific, practical purpose improves performance.
The Tin Man organization treats corporate purpose as a vague, aspirational marketing slogan—a "convenient purpose" that is quickly forgotten when business gets tough. This creates cynical employees and customers who see no difference between the stated mission and the daily reality.
The Octopus, by contrast, operates with deep purpose. It uses a clear, authentic cause to make tough strategic trade-offs, drive "intrinsic motivation," and create a resilient, high-performing culture.
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Our Recommended Reading List
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Book: Deep Purpose: The Heart and Soul of High-Performance Companies by Ranjay Gulati
Framework Guide: The Golden Circle by Simon Sinek
Article: Creating a Meaningful Corporate Purpose
HBR Article: What Is the Purpose of Your Purpose?
Antipattern #3
Making “Everything”
The Strategy
A sharp focus on just a few durable customer needs creates unique value.
The Tin Man organization is driven by broad ambition rather than focused strategy, attempting to excel at everything. It risks diffusing effort and limiting overall impact. Its strategy documents often contain aspirational goals, but they lack the clear, explicit choices that define a true strategic path.
The Octopus, by contrast, operates on deliberate trade-offs. It understands that the power of strategy comes from making difficult, explicit choices about where to play and how to win (and where not to!), thereby channeling all energy and resources toward a uniquely differentiated position.
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Our Recommended Reading List
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Book: A New Way to Think: Your Guide to Superior Management Effectiveness by Roger L. Martin
Video: Richard Rumelt on Defining a Good Strategy (The Kernel Model)
Antipattern #4
Pursuing Fluffy Goals
Goals connected to customer
impact guide growth.
The Tin Man organization often defaults to goals that are broadly defined, may feel like restatements of the obvious, tend to be flavored with buzzwords, and do not clearly articulate a strategic choice. These vague targets fail to inspire action and are quickly ignored in the rush of daily work.
The Octopus, by contrast, operates on radical specificity. It uses frameworks that make ambiguity difficult, forcing goals to be clear, actionable, customer-centric, and directly linked to a diagnosed challenge.
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Our Recommended Reading List
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Book: Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
Guide: The Working Backwards PR/FAQ Method
Book: The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps Between Plans, Objectives and Reality
Antipattern #5
Misusing Metrics
Measures connected to value and
purpose supercharge learning.
The Tin Man organization can sometimes struggle with an over-reliance on defining and meeting absolute metrics, rigidly measuring and incentivizing performance based on easily quantifiable numbers that may unintentionally drive destructive behaviors. This approach can lead to metric distortion and unintended consequences like gaming the system or sacrificing long-term quality to hit the target.
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The Octopus, by contrast, operates on data-informed judgment. It uses relative and input metrics as tools for learning and diagnosis, ensuring that data guides expertise rather than replacing it.
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Our Recommended Reading List
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Book: How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business
Book: The Tyranny of Metrics
Article: Beware of the Cobra Effect in Business (Explaining the danger of Goodhart's Law)
HBR Article: Designing Metrics for Business Value (Focusing on leading indicators)
Antipattern #6
Working Together But Not As A Team
Executives committed to collaborating with their peers to jointly deliver enterprise-wide value.
It's a common organizational pattern that the Tin Man organization’s leadership is not a team but a "collection of leaders." In this structure, each executive may inadvertently optimize for their own silo, maintaining surface-level harmony while harboring unaddressed misalignments that can unintentionally sabotage execution. This leads to organizational drag and competing priorities.
The Octopus, by contrast, operates as a single, cohesive "First Team." It prioritizes organizational health, engages in constructive conflict, and fosters the peer-to-peer accountability necessary to achieve collective clarity and unified results.
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Our Recommended Reading List
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Book: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Talk: Patrick Lencioni on the Five Dysfunctions
Book: Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
Book: Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High
Antipattern #7
Declaring Superficial Principles
Values that are useful, lived,and living foster trust and engagement and independent action.
The Tin Man organization often relies on superficial principles—vague, aspirational values like "Integrity" and "Teamwork" that are printed on posters but may not have the clarity to generate consistent behavioral change. This creates internal cynicism and a gap between stated values and lived reality.
The Octopus, by contrast, treats its principles as systematic decision-making algorithms. They are honestly defined, have clear implications, and are used daily to clarify identity and set non-negotiable behavioral boundaries.
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Our Recommended Reading List
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Book: Principles: Life and Work
Video: Principles For Success
Original Slide Deck: Netflix Culture Deck
Interviews: Jeff Bezos explains the meaning and background to Amazon’s leadership principles.
Antipattern #8
Spreading Priorities Too Thinly
The embrace of a few initiativesthat make you say “Hell, yes!”creates
focus and impact.
The Tin Man organization often faces the challenge of the "Pursuit of Everything," a situation where energy is diffused across countless initiatives, all of which are deemed "top priority." This proliferation leads to productivity loss from context switching, minimal progress on all fronts, and widespread organizational exhaustion.
The Octopus, by contrast, operates on the disciplined pursuit of less. It uses rigorous selection criteria and the clarity to say "no," ensuring all available energy and resources are focused solely on achieving the vital few priorities.
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Our Recommended Reading List
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Book: Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
Video: Greg McKeown on Essentialism Insights
Article: Warren Buffett's philosophy of saying "no.”
Overview: The Eisenhower Matrix
Antipattern #9
Customizing Commodities
Buying wheels instead of reinventing them frees people to focus on differentiators.
The clarity required for sourcing is determining which activities truly confer a unique competitive advantage, differentiating between what must be "made" (kept in-house) versus commodities that should be "bought" (outsourced or acquired off-the-shelf).
These aren’t one time decisions as they need to be regularly re-evaluated, as capabilities that were once unique differentiators (e.g., managing your own email servers) naturally become commoditized over time. Doing so helps the organizations avoid wasting precious talent and capital on undifferentiated heavy lifting.
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Our Recommended Reading List
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HBR Article: "Strategic Sourcing: To Make or Not To Make"
Article: Here’s why the Juicero’s Press is so Expensive
Video: Whatever happened to Juicero? The $120 Million Juicer?
Video: Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones
Book: Wardley Maps
Antipattern #10
Entrenching Silos
A focus on the flow of value,from idea to customer,breaks through bottlenecks.
Antipattern #11
Guarding Information
Making insights accessible to everyone creates transparency that fosters innovation.
The Tin Man organization often defaults to a "need-to-know" basis, a practice where information is closely guarded, sometimes to maintain status, reinforce hierarchy, or avoid scrutiny. This unintentionally chokes the organization's nervous system, making it slow and incapable of adapting to complex challenges.
The Octopus, by contrast, operates by providing radical context. It pushes critical information out to the edges of the organization, as the strategic prerequisite for speed and decentralized action.
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Our Recommended Reading List
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TEDTalk: How to build a company where the best ideas win
Book: Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio
Talk: The military case for sharing knowledge
Paper: A typology of organisational cultures by Dr Ron Westrum
TedTalk: How to turn a group of strangers into a team, Amy Edmondson
Antipattern #12
Leaning on Reorgs
Small, iterative changes and the thought ful allocation of people to where they are needed keep restructures at bay.
The Tin Man organization too often views a reorg as the ultimate tool for transformation. It treats structure like a blunt-force, linear solution to systemic, behavioral issues. This creates chronic churn and fatigue.
The Octopus, by contrast, focuses on changing the flow of work and team behaviors before redrawing the org chart, viewing structure as an adaptable tool to maximize value delivery, not a static solution for addressing core issues.
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Our Recommended Reading List
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Book: The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
Book: ReOrg: How to get it right
Book: Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais
Antipattern #13
Gaming Budgets
​Dynamic forecasting and transparency direct money to where it produces the most value.
The Tin Man organization is often trapped in the rigid annual budgeting cycle. This process unintentionally incentivizes managers to focus on "making the numbers instead of making a difference," leading to political maneuvering, dysfunctional behavior, and a separation between strategy and resource allocation.
The Octopus, by contrast, operates on adaptive management. It separates strategic planning from financial targets, using rolling forecasts, relative benchmarking, and decentralized decision-making to align incentives with genuine performance and customer value.
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Our Recommended Reading List
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Book: Beyond Budgeting: How Managers Can Break Free from the Annual Performance Trap
Article: Why Budgeting Cripples Agile and Innovation
Book: Thinking, Fast and Slow
Article: Stop Annual Planning, Scrap Budgeting (Handelsbanken Case Study)