The Open Organization: Two years later and going strong

Two years ago, Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst released his book, The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance. The book was ahead of its time, focusing on the need for businesses around the world to abandon top-down, command-and-control approaches to organizing and management and embrace an open organization model. In the last two years, we’ve seen business leaders recognize and adopt what we have been practicing for years: They now see that by opening up their businesses, they can react more quickly and effectively to the changes in the world around them. Since its publication, the book has sold nearly 44,000 copies, has been translated into multiple languages (including Japanese and Italian), and was one of Forbes’ most creative leadership books of 2015.

As we promised when the book launched, Red Hat will donate proceeds from the first three years of sales of The Open Organization to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that champions digital rights issues and technology development. We are thrilled to be able to support an organization like EFF that champions many of the same issues close to Red Hat’s heart.

Proving that the conversation never stops, the open organization community at Opensource.com also launched a companion series to Jim’s book. Each volume in the series dives deeper into a different aspect of open organizational design. Books include The Open Organization Field Guide, The Open Organization: Catalyst-In-Chief, and The Open Organization Leaders Manual.

To celebrate the The Open Organization’s second anniversary, we’re now adding a fourth companion piece to the series—The Open Organization Guide to IT Culture Change. To create this book, more than 25 contributors from open source communities, companies, and projects collaborated to offer hard-won lessons and practical advice for creating a more open IT department—one that can deliver better, faster results and unparalleled business value.

Red Hat’s executive vice president and CIO, Mike Kelly, explains it best in the introduction for the book, “the IT department is uniquely positioned to handle change. Good IT teams manage change. The best ones lead change. As the pace of change accelerates today—and at a time when technology is in many respects the asset of a company—organizations are demanding their IT departments demonstrate more leadership than ever before. Today's highest-performing IT teams are leveraging open principles to lead their organizations through monumental technological, social, and economic changes. They're becoming more collaborative and more transparent—and more agile and accountable as a result.”

What makes this book unique is that it was developed completely using the Open Decision Framework—writers, designers, copy editors, and proofreaders worked to craft it together on GitHub, where the book source code is available.

Download your Creative Commons-licensed copy today or purchase a paperback copy of the book from our publishing partner, Lulu.