July 2, 2021
The news recently broke
that Jim Whitehurst is becoming
President of IBM. The announcement in late-2018 of the acquisition of Red Hat by
industry stalwarts, IBM, for $34 billion turned heads fast. Not least because
those familiar with Whitehurst and Open Source knew that with the acquisition,
Whitehurst would almost certainly become a notable senior leader or potentially
CEO at IBM.
Whitehurst’s career rise is interesting. Formerly a management
consultant and then COO of Delta Airlines, Whitehurst joined Red Hat in 2008,
throwing himself into an unusual place both in terms of the business and the
operating culture of the company. The company has felt his success though, with
Red Hat revenue and stock consistently
growing throughout his tenure.
His business performance is unquestioned. What is really interesting
though is Whitehurst’s secret sauce: his deft understanding of people, their
drivers, and how he can weave them together to grow a business.
The Red Hat Backstory
To understand this, we
need to understand the backstory of Whitehurst at Red Hat.
Red Hat is one of the
most notable successes in the history of open source business. Forged in 1993,
Red Hat have not just experienced meteoric growth, but they have become a
cultural staple of the open source ecosystem. While many open source brands
have struggled over the years as they wrestled to balance building open
technology with making a profit, Red Hat have not suffered this fate.
Why? Because the company
has retained it’s integrity throughout this period of change, managing to
balance their relationship with two very different worlds: the commercial
businesses who buy their tech and keep the Red Hat lights on,
and the open source contributors and staff who build their tech and have helped fuel the rise of
open source.
Understanding the nuance of
these audiences can’t be underlined enough. For all intents and purposes,
companies like Red Hat are weird.
Their staff, many of whom have been there for many years, have
developed a very, very distinct set of cultural norms. Strongly-held views on
software licensing, platforms and tools used for building technology,
communication best practices, privacy considerations, the balance between open
projects and products...these are all part of Red Hat’s culture. Many of these
views hover in the ether: they are not documented, they are not stated and they
are characteristics of the open source tribe. It is not a command and control
culture but instead a hierarchy of both roles and respect.
When Whitehurst joined Red Hat in 2008, coming from Delta, many
people, myself included were suspicious. How the hell could the COO of an
airline understand all this nuance at Red Hat? Many envisioned Whitehurst as
the manifestation of classic corporate America and Red Hat as the antithesis of
that. “This is going to go down in flames”, many uttered from the sidelines.
A Focus On Collaborative Culture
It didn’t go down in flames. Quite the opposite.
Whitehurst came into the company and started to listen. He
worked to understand the culture, the driving forces and intentionally received
counsel at all layers of the organization.
As he started to deliver his leadership, it resonated carefully
across Red Hat and beyond. I know hundreds of people at Red Hat and almost
everyone I met couldn’t sing higher praises of him. His leadership was not
perceived as fake or condescending which other leaders who have been accused of
when they over-index on the collaboration message. Whitehurst was seen as
genuine and focused on harnessing what made Red Hat different: their culture.
I first met Jim back back in 2015 when I flew out to their HQ in
Raleigh for some meetings about opensource.com. We met and then had a few
follow-on calls where I gathered material for another Forbes piece (that also included
content from Scott Guthrie from Microsoft.)
I saw what the Red Hat people saw. It is difficult to capture
what was unique about Whitehurst but it is the same patterns I have seen in
other phenomenal leaders. He is a genuine listener, clear in his focus and
vision, collaborative in his demeanor and always focused on enabling the
success of his colleagues.
Whitehurst’s philosophy was illustrated perfectly by something
he shared with me for my new book, ‘People
Powered: How communities can supercharge your business, brand, and teams’:
“Our innovative technologies are an output of our organizational
culture—our people—who give us the ability to adapt and rebound in the wake of
disruptive change. Red Hat contributes to dozens of open-source communities in
areas where we don’t have commercial products. We do this because these are
areas important to the open-source communities in which we are active, and the
work needs to be done. We understand that there is value in contributing
whether or not there is a direct quid pro quo. It’s part of what’s made us
successful.”
Whitehurst was clearly able to connect together products,
technology and Red Hat culture into one unified machine. This paved the way for
Red Hat’s success.
What This Means For IBM
IBM is the perfect place for Whitehurst to be, especially
now.
In recent years, IBM has struggled as a brand. Gone are the days
of, “No-one gets fired for buying IBM”. They have struggled to stay relevant
and shake off their reputation as a technology firm that is old, dated, and
dusty.
This reputation is not because of their technology. IBM has
consistently built amazing tech, and their work on Watson (especially in AI),
IBM Q, IBM Cloud and others are illustrative of this. Where they have struggled
is with relevance, especially outside of behemoth multi-national enterprises.
Internally, parts of IBM have also become dated and developed a bit of a
reputation as staffed by neck-bearded IBM lifers.
Whitehurst is perfectly positioned to help shift this future and
culture at IBM. His clear understanding of the technology and enterprise market
and product value is one thing, but being able to engineer the cultural
revolution that Red Hat has experienced will be his ticket and ultimately his
swan song.
Now, this will be hard work, and will test Whitehurst to his
limits, but he has the blueprint and experience. IBM has the talent, the tech,
and the Red Hat brand. This is a game that is theirs to lose if they don’t get
this right.
As someone said to me privately, “IBM didn’t buy Red Hat, Red
Hat bought IBM”. If Whitehurst and colleagues can do this well, it could
transform the future of one of tech’s oldest and most well-known firms.
Jono Bacon is the author of
‘People Powered: How
communities can supercharge your business, brand and teams’,
published by HarperCollins and now available.
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