Jim Whitehurst

This is a story of reinvention. Jim Whitehurst, celebrated president and CEO of one of the world's most revolutionary software companies, tells first-hand his journey from traditional manager (Delta Air Lines, Boston Consulting Group) and “chief” problem solver to CEO of one of the most open organizational environments he'd ever encountered. This challenging transition, and what Whitehurst learned in the interim, has paved the way for a new way of managing—one this modern leader sees as the only way companies will successfully function in the future. Whitehurst says beyond embracing the technology that has so far disrupted entire industries, companies must now adapt their management and organizational design to better fit the Information Age. His mantra? “Adapt or die.” Indeed, the successful company Whitehurst leads—the open source giant Red Hat—has become the organizational poster child for how to reboot, redesign, and reinvent an organization for a decentralized, digital age. Based on open source principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration, “open management” challenges conventional business ideas about what companies are, how they run, and how they make money. This book provides the blueprint for putting it into practice in your own firm. He covers challenges that have been missing from the conversation to date, among them: how to scale engagement; how to have healthy debates that net progress; and how to attract and keep the “Social Generation” of workers. Through a mix of vibrant stories, candid lessons, and tested processes, Whitehurst shows how Red Hat has blown the traditional operating model to pieces by emerging out of a pure bottom up culture and learning how to execute it at scale. And he explains what other companies are, and need to be doing to bring this open style into all facets of the organization. By showing how to apply open source methods to everything from structure, management, and strategy to a firm's customer and partner relationships, leaders and teams will now have the tools needed to reach a new level of work. And with that new level of work comes unparalleled success. The Open Organization is your new resource for doing business differently. Get ready to make traditional management thinking obsolete.

Igniting Passion and Performance

The Open Organization

Gavin Booth

Mike Nevin

The Strategic Alliances Fieldbook: The Art of Agile Alliances is for technology and professional services practitioners and executives seeking faster value from their partnerships as traditional alliances are changing rapidly in form and tempo. Digitising customer channels and internal operations has been a long-running initiative for most companies, and the global COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the urgency and budgets associated with the digital transformations that technology and professional services companies support. The Strategic Alliances Fieldbook compiles a century of the authors’ experience of leading joint businesses to solve the problem of how to go fast and avoid common issues that delay alliances. The reader will get a detailed analysis of professional services companies and technology companies and how the dynamics of their collective culture and operating model are shaped when working in partnership. The book provides a ‘Blueprint’: a library of methods that includes 15 templates which can be applied to accelerate any alliance. The book also includes 19 case studies to illustrate real-life situations. This book is particularly relevant to executives involved in partnership initiatives, specifically in professional services and technology firms, and can be read in conjunction with The Strategic Alliance Handbook by Mike Nevin.

Jim Whitehurst

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