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The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance, by Jim Whitehurst.
PUT these ideas together.
Bureaucracy is the organisational form designed to maximise control, coordination, and consistency to produce efficiency and reliability. It worked effectively when workers performed rote tasks on assembly lines or in offices. Today we use robots to do these mundane tasks reliably, accurately and efficiently.
Your staff’s abilities that can have the biggest impact on the success of your company are the ones that cannot be managed. These include enthusiasm, caring, commitment, creativity and so on.
For the last three decades I have come across examples of companies that were designed in anti-bureaucratic forms and that worked exceptionally well, such as the Spanish Mondragon Corporation (75 000 people,) or WL Gore (9 000 people in 30 countries).
In an era when a technology-enabled mob can overthrow a dictator, the business question is whether the same energy can be used to drive organisations, serve customers, produce goods or develop software.
Jim Whitehurst believes it can - and he is in a unique position to make this assertion.
As the former chief operating officer at Delta Air Lines, where he took a lead role in the company’s much-needed restructuring, he understood and ran a top-down, command and control organisation.
He currently heads Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open-source software, employing more than 7 000 people and with a market value of more than $10bn.
Its software is trusted to power submarines, and its customers include the New York Stock Exchange, DreamWorks, Sprint and 90% of the Fortune 500 companies.
Some 50 years ago, leadership thinker Warren Bennis predicted we would be in organisations that feel like communities, not hierarchies. This is no longer an ideal, it is a business necessity. Beating your competition is no longer a one-time event with a clever strategy that lasts forever. Simply pedalling faster is not enough, and central planning is too time- and resource-consuming.
Whitehurst saw an alternative way in the process at Red Hat and describes its powerful method as “the Open Organization”. Similar methods are in use in the many successful companies he cites. General Electric’s Durham jet engine plant has 400 skilled technicians working in self-organising teams, with the supervision of only one plant manager.
Something similar exists in Whole Foods, Pixar, Zappos and Starbucks.
These are “communities” where the principles are different. The basis for loyalty is a common purpose, not economic dependency. Openness, transparency, participation and collaboration are the very reasons the companies make money. The best ideas win, regardless of who they come from.
This book is important because so many executives can scarcely imagine an alternative to the organisational status quo, even if they know that bureaucracy is hobbling their organisations and slowing them up. They can feel how close their faster, more nimble universal competitors have come, and they know the danger.
An “open organisation” responds to opportunities more quickly, accesses talent and inspires, motivates and empowers people at all levels to act with accountability.
Executive behaviour needs to change
So, how does one move towards an open organisation? It starts with the realisation that this is a journey not an event, and that many things will have to be different, starting with executive behaviour.
Whitehurst shares a seminal experience he had soon after joining Red Hat. “Early on, I issued what I thought was an order to create a research report. A few days later, I asked the people assigned to the task how things were going. 'Oh, we decided it was a bad idea, so we scrapped it,' they told me in good cheer.”
Whitehurst’s response was that the team was correct to turn down the job if they thought it was not a good idea, or equally importantly, because he had failed to convince them of its importance.
Open organisations such as Red Hat are the product of complex, subtle and powerful organising systems that truly free people to take more initiative, be more creative and more effective.
As business gets harder it is easy to forget the role of passion in an organisation. The leader’s role in a twenty-first entury organisation includes being the “cheerleader-in-chief”. Having boundless passion for the mission is common in start-ups but seems to fade as the organisation grows.
The 7 000 people in Red Hat are spread across more than 80 offices and working remotely worldwide, are fired by the passion most companies ignore.
Only a deep passion for what the organisation stands for drives people to bring their all to their work. Whole Foods has as their purpose nothing less than to provide food and beverages so that their customers become healthier and live fuller lives. Open-source is no different for those who work at Red Hat.
Passion will fade unless it is diligently, carefully and consistently nurtured.
“The Open Organization” is a chronicle of successful practices Whitehurst uses to fire employees’ passion and really engage them. Engagement is not serving sushi lunches, but rather actually engaging with people, and enabling them to engage with their work and colleagues.
The book shows how everyone can and should have an earned level of influence through the merit they display.
Most importantly, it is a fine description of the changing nature of leadership required today. This book could change the way your company functions and change your level of success.
Readability: Hight --+-- Serious
Insights: High -+--- Low
Practical: High -+--- Low
* Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy and is the author of Strategy that Works. Views expressed are his own.
