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Red Hat CEO Publishes Open Source Management Memoir
ectoman writes: Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has just published The Open Organization, a book that chronicles his tenure as leader of the world's largest open source company. The book aims to show other business leaders how open source principles like transparency, authenticity, access, and openness can enhance their organizations. It's also filled with information about daily life inside Red Hat. Whitehurst joined Red Hat in 2008 after leaving Delta Airlines, and he says his time working in open source has changed him. "I thought I knew what it took to manage people and get work done," he writes in The Open Organization. "But the techniques I had learned, the traditional beliefs I held for management and how people are taught to run companies and lead organizations, were to be challenged when I entered the world of Red Hat and open source." All proceeds from the book benefit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Opensource.com is hosting free book club materials.
Please read this book. It shows that you can lead an open source company and *not* be universally hated.
patting himself on the back.
Seems like he took over just before Red Hat started to suck.
For the last few years, Red Hat has been making a lot of peculiar decisions to replace standard Linux components, with inferior Red Hat components. Now we have systemd, and an all out war against POSIX, and all things standard UNIX/Linux in favor of Red Hat's propriety solutions.
I am surprised that so few people see the writing on the wall.
Does it discuss systemd and Red Hat's support of it?
"All proceeds from the book benefit the Electronic Frontier Foundation", that's all I need to hear.
I'm buying a copy for Michael Rogers as well.
Let's see, he came from running Delta Airlines to run RH. Then, back in December, at a RH dog-and-pony here at work, we watched a 20 min video as part of the many-hour presentation. I was amazed at how he could fill the entire 20 minutes with *nothing* but management buzzwords, and say pretty much nothing else at all.
mark
One of the things that bothers me about books like this is how they become primary reference material for MBAs and managers. I've lost count of how many times managers have referenced "Good to Great" or Jack Welch's book to implement very questionable policies. Some guy waxing poetic on what a wonderful job he's done is a lot different from a rigorous study.
One real world example about anecdotal evidence shaping global HR policy is the Google "open floor plan" office trend. Our company is moving from semi-private cubes and offices to a hideous Google-style design. This is for a professional services company where most people require quiet, and are taking phone calls and working on individual/small group projects, not for a software startup. We and countless other companies are doing this simply because Google does it, and has published many articles on how wonderful it is. Evidence is coming out against this (increased sick time, loss of concentration, people hating their co-workers more, etc.) but damnit, if it works for Google it must be right.
Find some self-important chump to build a crew and write lots of overbearing crap code, then approve all of those "contributions", encouraging inclusion so that the rest of the open source will have to follow. That's how you lead CEO style in open source land.
Steal, take credit for, or both.
I haven't come across anything that seems like bad advice, yet. The two biggest points seem to be:
- good ideas come from anywhere, and you should build your organization in a way that allows those ideas to surface
- Similarly, "leaders" and "leadership" should be emergent phenomena, and not handed down from on high by some predefined organization structure.
Red Hat for years has been good for open source. Jim has done a great job with his role there, as well. Since he took over, they surpassed the $1B mark and have been successful along the way as a company. Red Hat gives back to the community so they are a true open source company and their interests are definitely pro open source. This is very much unlike other companies that say they are for open source, but their actions say otherwise. Interesting that he is publishing this book and it might be worth checking out. The model Red Hat uses is clearly working, and now that they are officially supporting CentOS, the free alternative to their software but without support, is also a blessing. Cheers to many good years ahead.