Leadership in Open Organizations

Open organizations flip the script about how teams and organizations should be organized. The "open organization" name comes from Jim Whitehurst's 2015 book, The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance. Instead of a traditional top-down approach, Whitehurst described the open culture at Red Hat Software and how the open organization nature enabled the company to take risks and react swiftly to changes.

The Open Organization inspired many other organizations to adopt a similar model. As a result, open organizations can appear in many forms, but they are all defined by the five principles of transparency, inclusivity, adaptability, collaboration, and community. Transitioning an organization to adopt an open organization culture can be a challenge, but the effort can be very rewarding. Open organizations engage their staff and promote innovation, which in turn leads to increased agility.

Leadership lessons in open organizations

We are fortunate to have Ron McFarland as an Open Organization Ambassador. Ron has a long history in working with organizations, and he uses those decades to share his perspectives on how open organizations can change the world.

Ron regularly contributes his open organization leadership perspectives with our readers at Coaching Buttons, an open community about Leadership. At Coaching Buttons, we welcome anyone to share their story about leadership. And we are glad to have Ron as part of that community. Ron's reflections about how open principles can transform organizations and help them thrive have been very popular with our readers.

Read the book

We wanted to collect Ron's leadership essays into a book, to recognize Ron's contribution in open organization leadership. Leadership in Open Organizations collects 36 of Ron's essays on open organizations, covering a range of topics including leadership book reviews, and resources for open global leadership. Through Ron's essays, we have an international leader’s reflections on open organizations, open leadership, and entrepreneurial leadership.

In preparing the book, I tried to preserve Ron's essays as they were written, only making minor edits and updating the diagrams to make them more suitable for print. These are Ron's leadership essays as you can find them on Coaching Buttons.

Ron's essays are organized as chapters. Some are single articles, others are a series of two or three articles around a common theme. This organization means you do not need to read the book in order; instead, you can decide on your own reading order, reading some chapters first and others later on. For example, you might carefully review all the chapter titles first, and then zoom in on those topics that are most interesting to you.

Download the free ebook (PDF)

Buy a print copy (340 pages)