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Culture Shift at Big Blue
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With the news of President and CEO Ginni Rometty’s retirement and the elevation of Arvind Krishna to replace her as chief executive, IBM simultaneously announced that Jim Whitehurst (MBA 1994) will step up as the company’s next president. The decision suggests that IBM, among the old guard of tech firms, is due for shift in culture.
A former COO at Delta Airlines, Whitehurst joined Red Hat as CEO in 2008. Although his corporate background may have seemed like a surprising fit for Red Hat—the open-source antithesis of corporate—his business performance has remained unassailable, Jono Bacon writes in Forbes. The company’s revenues grew consistently throughout his tenure, up to and beyond Red Hat’s acquisition by IBM in 2018.
“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.”
While others have struggled, Red Hat has been a huge success in the open source business, managing to retain a careful balance between the vastly different worlds of the commercial businesses that buy their technology and the open source contributors and staff who build it. Red Hat’s success boils down the power of collaborative culture, Bacon writes.
Which is just what IBM needs now, as it aims to become more competitive in the cloud wars. “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.”
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