culture

Rethinking communications in the 21st century company

Last week a colleague told me IBM had reorganized it’s marketing and communications functions. In the new order, the entire marketing organization would report into communications. Typically it has always been the opposite, with brand groups like mine and public relations reporting into a Chief Marketing Officer. Until recently, that’s been the way it worked at Red Hat too– over the years I’ve worked for mostly VP of marketing or CMO-types (although now I work as part of a group called People & Brand, a subject I’ll save for another post).

So I spent some time thinking about what this change meant for IBM, why they were doing it, and did a little research online. In the process, I stumbled upon this report from the  Arthur W. Page Society entitled “The Authentic Enterprise.” Turns out that one of the co-chairs of the Authentic Enterprise task force was  John Iwata, the SVP of Communications for IBM. My guess is that this report, which came out in 2007, had significant impact in making the changes at IBM.

Thought I’d call out a few choice quotes from the report that I loved.

Continue reading →

People who get it #1: Gary Hamel

My friends Jeff Mackanic and David Burney both recommended that I read Gary Hamel’s latest book, The Future of Management, which was named the best business book of the year by Amazon in 2007. I was absolutely blown away. The whole way through, I was like, “tell it, brother!”

The basic thesis of the book? The management model developed in the late 19th and early 20th century and integral to the success of the industrial revolution is starting to show signs of wear. It is being replaced by a new model, embodied by companies like Whole Foods, Google, and W.L. Gore (the makers of Gore-Tex); all three are highlighted in the book.

Red Hat, and the open source movement in general, are another perfect case study of this new management model. Concepts like the meritocracy of ideas, transparency & openness, collaboration, authenticity, and a whole host of other ideas that have made Red Hat successful appear over and over in the book.

Continue reading →

Pepsi ads blur the line

Was watching Saturday Night Live last night and saw some Pepsi ads that were based off of what was previously an SNL skit starring Will Forte. There were three ads, all based on the “MacGruber” parody of MacGyver SNL has been running for a while.

The first one had product placement for Pepsi in a small way, by the third one, every word that came out of Will Forte’s mouth was Pepsi. It was totally over the top, completely transparent product placement. And pretty damn funny by the end. I loved it.

My view? A huge win for Pepsi, breaking new product placement ground by co-opting an existing (and funny) Saturday Night Live skit, and being extremely self-aware about product placement and people’s feelings about it. Blew it wide open. Freakin’ hilarious.

For Saturday Night Live? I’m pretty sure the SNL folks woke up on Sunday morning with a bad hangover. Wondering what exactly they’d done, and hoping that no one else remembered either. Maybe Robert Redford was right. Make an indecent proposal with enough money attached, and someone will do anything.

Metrics that matter

Have you ever been zooming in on a Google map, and eventually you zoom so far in that Google apologizes and tells you that it doesn’t have an image showing stuff that close? What do you do? You zoom back out so that you can see again.

When it comes to running campaigns, I tend to take metrics with a few grains of salt. How many times have you seen someone report metrics on how their campaign did, and they show that it drove zillions of leads and that converted to zillions of $$ in sales and was a huge success… but then you look around and can’t find anyone who saw the campaign, or heard of it. And the sales guys couldn’t ever even tell it happened.

Continue reading →

Build a leadership culture

When we are at our best at Red Hat, we have a leadership culture instead of a management culture.

What’s the difference? My favorite example of understanding the difference is from Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink.

The story is about US General Paul Van Riper, who is trying out some military strategies to see how they will work in the field. In the book he says:

“The first thing I told my staff is that we would be in command and out of control.”

Most companies have a culture of management. The people in charge are in command and in control of everything. Managers give the orders, decide the strategy, and the workers follow the orders, implement the strategies. This is the way 90+% of businesses work and have worked for a very long time. It’s a good model for lots of businesses. Keeps things running efficiently, keeps chaos in check.

This model does not work very well in an open source world. Why? A couple of key reasons: Continue reading →

Get the organization aligned

When I first arrived at Red Hat in 1999, I have to say I didn’t get the warmest welcome in the world. After all, I’d just joined Red Hat from IBM, which many earlier Red Hat folks viewed as exactly the kind of corporate culture they were trying to escape. I think IBM is a great company, but it certainly didn’t define me either, so I was a little surprised the first time someone came up to me and said, “Don’t worry, you’ll drink the Kool-Aid soon enough.”

Now I knew where this idea came from. But I kind of thought I had already drunk the Kool-Aid– that’s why I left the security of IBM to join this crazy company after all. What I learned over the next few years is that everyone tastes the Kool-Aid a little differently. Red Hat meant very different things to different people, even if they all thought they were drinking the same Kool-Aid. I learned what I didn’t know very quickly… but I learned it on my own.

So how do you make it easier for everyone you employ to have a shared vision of what the company hopes to accomplish? How to do you ensure that everyone in the organization is aligned (and excited!) about a common cause? Continue reading →

Give me something to believe in

I’m a dreamer.

I am inspired by ideas.

In Myers-Briggs language, I am an INFP. It’s a pretty rare Myers-Briggs type, but some other famous INFPs are Shakespeare, Yeats, Helen Keller, Princess Diana, Tom Brokaw, JFK Jr., Julia Roberts, and Homer (the Greek, not the Simpson). We share a lot in common with ENFPs, the only difference being that they are extroverts (the E) vs. introverts (the I). The most famous ENFP of the moment is none other than President Barack Obama.

As it turns out even though INFPs (1%) and ENFPs (5%) together make up only a very small percentage of the general population, I’ve found in my time at Red Hat that I’ve run into more than my share of dreamers (INFP) and visionaries (ENFP). Continue reading →

The open source way

At heart, Red Hat is an open source company.

Now that will either mean something to you or it won’t. If you aren’t familiar with open source, there are plenty of good sites that will teach you better than I will.

If you are familiar with open source, you are probably also familiar with some of the key concepts. I try not to be too precise about defining open source. To me, it is basically a DNA soup of related ideas which, when put together, make up the open source way. It is almost like a cultural map for a way of working and operating. Continue reading →

Introduction

Only about 4% of the total energy density in the universe can be seen directly.
About 96% is thought to be composed of dark matter or dark energy.
(Wikipedia)

July 2009: See my update on the topics covered in this post here.

I’ve been intrigued by the idea of dark matter for a while. But it was actually hearing about this thing called the Large Hadron Collider that helped me make the connection between what I do for a living and this concept of dark matter.

The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s largest particle accelerator. It was built on the border of France and Switzerland and is about 17 miles long. One of the things that particle physicists hope to prove with this enormous project is that dark matter actually exists. As I understand it, the accelerator shoots protons at super high speeds around the collider, and, if these scientists are lucky, it eventually might produce a few wacky particles that will exist for only a few milliseconds and then disappear again. And these particles might prove that dark matter isn’t just a theory. Continue reading →