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Red Hat CEO: How Open Organizations Are 'Unmanageably' Awesome

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It’s hard to find a company chief or head of evangelism that hasn’t written a book these days and Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst is no different. Whitehurst’s ‘The Open Organization’ is a worthy enough elucidation of why modern firms should build a culture that focuses on fostering engagement and debate… as well as one that defers to a meritocracy over a hierarchy.

Whitehurst believes that businesses should encourage leaders and managers to serve as catalysts sharing context, vision and ‘empowering’ people, not micro-managing and sending orders down the chain.

Unmanageable awesomeness

As book foreword author Gary Hamel puts it, we have a conundrum on our hands, “The human capabilities that are most critical success – i.e. the ones that can help your organization become more resilient, more creative and more, well awesome – are precisely the ones that can’t be ‘managed’. You can’t command initiative, creativity or passion.”

Previously chief operating officer at Delta Airlines with an expansive (if not that long, he’s a mid-sixties baby) commercial track record, Whitehurst advocates openness in (almost) every aspect of business, from software application development to departmental decision making. We must realize that in community-empowered business (and software programming) models, the basis for loyalty is a common purpose, not economic dependency.

Business = center to end, Internet = end to end

But software developers are lucky of course; they can work in relative isolation. Because they have the opportunity to work alone (or in teams where tasks can be precisely spliced and separated), so we must understand that the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ model works best when work can be easily disaggregated. Whitehurst insists that we can achieve degrees of disaggregation even in traditional ‘center to end’ (i.e. manager to employee) business models. General Electric’s jet engine plant in Durham, North Carolina operates with self-organizing teams. Morning Star tomato processing in California (the world’s largest tomato processor) operates with hundreds of ‘colleagues’ coordinating their activities through peer-to-peer agreements. So it is possible.

Red Hat’s Whitehurst champions transparency, participation and community. But he acknowledges that these virtues are no overnight recipe for success.

He asks, “While many companies have tapped into the power of participation in targeted ways, few have leveraged its power more broadly within their own organizations. What if you could make this kind of engagement [a new solidified] standard for how work gets done in your organization, so that you’re engaging at this level every single day?”

A new world order

Whitehurst is calling for a transition to towards these new business principals. He is calling for a new management paradigm. He is calling for a world where why matters more than what – and where lateral communication will be more important than vertical (i.e. management to employee) communication. Influence, in this new world order, comes from the value that you add as an individual worker, not from your job title.

“Everyone in an open organization like Red Hat, including the CEO, has to earn a level of influence through merit,” writes Whitehurst.

We’re on a mission from God

“Red Hat has shown me alternatives to the traditional approach to leadership and management,” insists Whitehurst. “Ones that are better suited to the fast paced environment of business. The conventional approach to business management was not designed to foster innovation, address the needs and expectations of the current workforce that demands more out of jobs (hello, Millennials), or operate at the accelerated speed of business. [I have come to realize] that the conventional way of running companies has major limitations that are now becoming more acute.”

You can find a link to The Open Organization here. Every chapter ends with Jim’s leadership tips such as: when you make your next decision, reflect on whether it was influenced by others’ points of view.

A personal perspective

Whitehurst is a nice guy and exceptionally open. He is probably one of the only technology industry CEOs that openly follows tech writers such as myself back on Twitter and (for what it’s worth) LinkedIn. Back in 2012 he ‘famously’ stated that there was "more innovation" now in open source technology than in proprietary development and he no doubt stands by that statement. Yes of course Whitehurst paints the rosiest of pictures when he’s talking (or writing) about the innovation energy that exists in open source (and indeed Red Hat), but he levels the spin with enough commercial caveats for caution to keep himself believable at all times.

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