Well, hello, everyone. My name is Jim Whitehurst, and I have to admit, I'm a recovering know it all CEO. I once believed that my job was to have all the answers. I was responsible for the problems facing my company, and importantly, it was my job to instill order and structure in the words of US President, Harry Truman, the buck stops here. That's what I thought my role was, and I was wrong, and I'm convinced I built this misconception very much because of my classic business background, I got an MBA. I worked for almost a dozen years at a consulting firm. I was ultimately recruited to Delta Airlines, where, over time, I became chief operating officer responsible for over 80,000 people in traditional management terms, things were going pretty well. Then in 2008 I was recruited to Red Hat as CEO. Red Hat is the open source software company that is at the front line of many of the innovations that are happening around us. And it's this last stop that made all the difference, because it's there that I realized in the 21st Century in dynamic environments, Leadership isn't about control and compliance, it's about creating the context for the best ideas to emerge out of Your organization. I began to realize something significant was happening my second week on the job at Red Hat, I was in a meeting talking to the team about our strategy for an area called virtualization. For those of you who aren't in technology, virtualization was the thing everybody was talking about before they were talking about the cloud. And through this, I had the senior team and a bunch of the engineers kind of walking through our strategy and the what's the why's of it. And about halfway through the meeting, one of the engineers, one of the most junior engineers, just took a pause and said, Look, I know this is what we're doing, but this is absolutely the wrong direction. And he didn't stop there. He kept going and going and going about why we were wrong and how wrong we were, and I'm looking across the room, because this room had his boss and his boss's boss, his boss, his boss's boss, waiting for a reaction. And there was a reaction, you know, I would call it a point and counterpoint, which is a very polite way to say we had a huge argument. But at the end of the meeting, everybody walked out like this was normal. Now I'm two weeks out of being in a very traditional organization, and I have to tell you, I was sitting here thinking this is the most bizarre thing that I had ever seen. I would hazard at delta. And frankly, most large organizations, and many of you know what I mean here, if a person to the CEO in front of their boss, their boss's boss, and their boss's boss's boss said what these people are doing is completely wrong. That person would have clearly been fired by the end of the day, and, to be honest, maybe killed before the end of the meeting. But everybody acted like this was normal. And I remember going home that night and talking to my wife, and I said, I have come into this most bizarre, strange company I've clearly been brought in to clean it up. And it it wasn't just this. Couple weeks later, I asked about doing a research report in an area, and a couple weeks later, when I asked about where that was, the team very happily and merrily said, Yeah, we thought was a bad idea, so we decided not to do that. So first, I really like, where's to have, like, a mutiny on my time, but they're so friendly, and they're like, positive about not doing what I told them to do. And so before I had a chance to impose kind of the traditional management structure, which I had learned so well and honed so well, I thought, well, you know what? Red Hat's been really successful before I got there, I at least need to step back and observe. And so my management consulting kicked in, and that's what I did. And I have to say I felt a little bit like an anthropologist tossed into some odd ecosystem, and I really had to hold myself back from wanting to inject myself. And I have to say, the first few months at Red Hat were, I think it's fair to say, shocking. It was just so different than anything I'd ever been used to, and I realized my role as a leader was going to look nothing like what I'd been used to in the past. At Delta, my job was to be the person who knew more than anyone else. When I walked into a meeting, I typically knew more because I had a purview to all of it. I knew more than others because I had access to more information than anyone. And that's not just at Delta. To I believe that's at any large organization. That's how decision rights are distributed. That's how information is distributed. Executives know more because they have access to more information, and therefore become integral to the decision processes that companies normally go through. And you know, I saw my role as the person who knew more different leaders different places have a different conception of their role, right? You get some leaders, I think, who see themselves as I'm the brilliant strategist who can get people to follow me, or I'm the FIX IT person, and I can go in and fix things better than you know anyone else, and so I can go in and help people solve problems. All of those are some flavor of helping people direct and decide, right? That's what you do. You direct and decide. You're applying structure. And in the 21st Century, where things are so much more volatile and so much more unknown and we're all worried about being disrupted, that is not the best role for a leader in today's world. Let me come back to that story about the engineer about three months after that initial conversation. So I was about three and a half months on the job, that same team came back to me and said, You know what? It turns out, he was right. Circumstances changed in the marketplace, and we need to now go pursue this other direction. And by the way, we need to go buy a company to do it, and we need to go do that quickly. And so let's get going. And that all happened without me asking it to be revisited or from some planning process. It just emerged as circumstances had changed, and so we needed to change direction. I think it's important that the people in that room, not a single one of them was apologetic or defensive, right? They weren't like me. They had been there for a while. They recognized that in a volatile, more dynamic environment, when circumstances change, you have to be ready to change. So success isn't about having the best ideas or making all the right decisions. Success is making a lot of decisions, but being open and transparent and non defensive enough to be willing to change those decisions when circumstances warrant and that's when I fully realized what my role as a leader needed to be. I wasn't going to be the person with the big binders of data like I was at Delta, and I wasn't the person who's going to make all the decisions. My job was to make sure that the right people had the appropriate data and everybody had a sense of the big picture of the company. My role as a leader was to make sure those conversations happened to foster a degree of conflict and for the really difficult things, to make sure that they stayed in front of people to bubble and simmer and churn. I wasn't the person brought in to clean up the chaos. I was the person brought in to scale this more organic way of working. To put it simply, I was brought in to create the context for people to do their best work. Now I was truly given a gift going from delta to Red Hat. I had to change right? I had a chance up front to see the difference between an organization optimized for efficiency in a static environment and an organization optimized for innovation in a dynamic environment, and that required me to change as a leader. Most leaders have a more difficult problem, right? Most leaders have this challenge of they see their organizations moving into a different competitive context where they need greater resilience and adaptability, so they have to take their organizations down that change path. And it's hard. And it's hard because it's not about changing processes and systems, it's about changing mindsets and behaviors, and change in behaviors is hard. I mean, I'll use the analogy losing weight. Losing weight intellectually is really simple. You only need four words, eat less, exercise more, pretty simple. Yet there are a million diet books out there. Why? Because managing your weight is really, really hard, right? Because it requires behavior change, and behavior change is particularly difficult when that behavior change requires that you have to do something painful in the short term for a long term gain. But I can tell you, as a leader who's lived through it, opening yourself up for criticism and encouraging it and allowing pushback all the time, feels like you've taken a club and you're just beating yourself on the head, and at some point you say, This just doesn't feel like a good thing to do, right? And so so many leaders, if you're not as intentional about managing and changing your behaviors and your mindset as you are your processes and your systems, you will backslide into the command and control systems and ways of being that you're so comfortable with, which is the managerial equivalent of kicking back on the couch and eating junk food. And I can tell you, those first few confrontational conversations are hard for confident leaders who try to exude confidence, saying, I don't know, and I don't know if it's noble, is hard, but over time, you build new muscle, and it gets easier, and after you have observed the power of a well functioning, self directed, collaborative organization, you'll say, I can't believe we ever acted another way. Thank you.

Last modified: Tuesday, October 7, 2025, 12:11 PM