Phil Le-Brun

Phil joined AWS as an Enterprise Strategist and Evangelist in September 2019. In this role, he shares practical lessons from his experiences implementing technology at scale. He uses these lessons to help enterprises succeed in achieving their own cloud-based technology goals to support organizational agility and customer-centricity.

Phil learned a long time ago that while technology continues to evolve, culture remains at the heart of a company’s sustainable advantage and success. He experienced this firsthand in his storied career of over 25 years at McDonald’s Corporation. He led large-scale efforts to centralize technology, also viewing this as an opportunity to change the culture of the organization. Today core technologies operate in 38,000 restaurants across 120 countries, serving 1% of the world's population every day.

Phil discovered that you can have the best technologists in the world, but unless you factor in people’s aspirations and motivations, you’ll be building things no one wants. From this vantage point, Phil was instrumental in starting McDonald’s journey to the cloud in 2010. Subsequently, he was part of the effort to achieve the CEO’s goal of saving $500 million in costs while also accelerating digital transformation across the business. With AWS as a partner, McDonald’s was able to scale e-commerce to 21,000 locations, and home delivery to 8,000 locations, in less than nine months—milestones that would have been impossible to reach before the cloud.

The power of change management is a theme that continues to play a central role in Phil’s approach with AWS customers today. It’s especially valuable in a world where educating leaders about cloud often requires putting fears and doubts to rest. It’s the approach Phil uses to help business leaders understand how they can harness a combination of culture and technology to become agile organizations.

Many enterprises have experienced challenges with cloud strategies and have been weighed down by inertia from multi-sourcing, pricing negotiations, concerns about risk, a tradition of owning data centers, and comfort with the status quo. Phil believes that the real conversation must be around people and culture; about opening doors for teams to rapidly experiment, learn fast, and quickly scale good ideas. A new mindset is required to unleash the talent in enterprises. Phil works with enterprise leaders and their teams to evolve internal cultures and accelerate cloud journeys.

Phil’s passion for helping enterprises to innovate spills over into his personal life, where he remains innately curious and is still actively learning about, and dabbling in, electronics, programming, data science, and a multitude of other hands-on interests.