Jim Whitehurst

My travels globally have given me a feeling for how best to work in many different contexts—like Latin America, West Africa, North Africa, and Southeast Asia, to name a few. And I've found that I can more easily adapt my work style in these countries if I focus on something that plays a role in all of them: trust. In The Open Organization, Jim Whitehurst mentions that accountability and meritocracy are both central components of open organizations. Trust is linked to both of those concepts. But the truth, I've found, is that many people don't have the information they need to determine whether they can trust a person or not. They need data, along with a system to evaluate that data and make decisions...

"Organizational culture" is something plenty of people are puzzling over today, and with good reason. More and more leaders are realizing that the culture permeating and guiding their organizations will determine whether they succeed or fail. The term “organizational culture” refers to an alignment between two forces inside an organization: values and behaviors. Aligning those forces productively is one of the most difficult and important tasks facing leaders today. Customers and partners routinely tell me they want to create a "culture of innovation" in their organizations. By this, they usually mean that they want to create contexts where certain actions—those that generate new and unforeseen sources of value capable of fueling growth—are not only expected but also commonplace...

While recently reading The Innovator's Mindset: Empower Learning, Unleash Talent and Lead, by George Couros, I was struck by the parallels between the author's thinking and that of Jim Whitehurst in The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance. "Sometimes it scares me to think that we have taken the most human profession, teaching, and have reduced it to simply letters and numbers," Couros says early in the book. "We place such an emphasis on these scores, because of political mandates and the way teachers and schools are evaluated today, that it seems we've forgotten why our profession exists: to change—improve—lives." In other words education has lost it's "Why?"—and that is central to its mission...

Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, was sporting his awesome red shoes as he spoke to a crowded room at All Things Open last week. During his keynote on Day 1, he talked about how open source is a key part of the open organization, but what we're all looking to achieve has implications far beyond software. Jim began his keynote by explaining why there is a need for the principles of open source in business. If we think of the world we come from and the world we are coming into we see that there is a long line of change...