Applied Poetics

Brand, culture, design, voice–Applied Poetics is about finding clarity and meaning in our organizations.

Tag Archives: Red Hat

Time to chase a new kind of dream

2 Comments Posted by on February 1, 2011

Last week the time had come for me to say goodbye to Red Hat. I joined the company on the third day of the year 2000. Red Hat was 350 people then. Today the company is over 3500 and is the largest and most recognized open source company in the world. I may have left [...]

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Sharing the story of Red Hat’s brand and culture

6 Comments Posted by on November 28, 2010

Last week I was asked to speak about brand and culture to a group of visiting MBA students from the Mason School of Business at the College of William & Mary. They came to Red Hat to learn more about the company, and I gave a talk on how brand and culture align at Red [...]

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Comparing leadership cultures and creating change

Leave a Comment Posted by on October 27, 2010

Yesterday I attended a panel on cultural leadership at the Coach K Leadership Conference at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business. The panel featured our own Senior VP of People and Brand at Red Hat, DeLisa Alexander, and Mark Reuss, President of General Motors North America.

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Jim Whitehurst: Don’t build a better mousetrap. Change the business model.

Leave a Comment Posted by on April 23, 2010

Companies that are creating massive value typically aren’t building a better mousetrap. They’re not improving on existing technologies or simply adding new features. Instead, they’re changing the business model. This was the message behind Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst’s keynote at today’s CED Venture 2010 Conference.

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Meeting our business challenges with creativity

Leave a Comment Posted by on February 14, 2010

A tide is turning for the state of business. We have come to realize the old ways of innovating and competing are no longer moving fast enough. We’re looking for new answers, and more importantly, new ways of finding them. This past week I had the pleasure of attending the 25th annual Emerging Issues Forum [...]

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Why do we love lists? Here are 5 reasons.

4 Comments Posted by on January 5, 2010

You see the headlines in Twitter all the time: “Top 5 WordPress themes for small businesses.” “10 ways to build your personal brand.” The lists go on. Especially right now when best-of and worst-of lists are everywhere. Not to be outdone, Time Magazine created a list of lists, the Top 10 of everything in 2009. [...]

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Change By Design–How to put design thinking to work

4 Comments Posted by on November 17, 2009

Design is too powerful to be used by designers alone. This is the essential idea behind the theory of design thinking–applying the principles and techniques of design to help organizations innovate, solve problems, and create positive change. Tim Brown, CEO and President of IDEO, should know. His new book, Change By Design, is about how [...]

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Reflections on the Coach K Leadership Conference

2 Comments Posted by on October 22, 2009

This week I had the pleasure of attending the Coach K Leadership Conference at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business. The theme of the conference was leading in times of uncertainty. I won’t try to summarize points from all of the presenters–mostly because that’s already been done, and done well: Just go to the Twitter stream [...]

Culture , , , ,

Where design thinking and open source community collaboration meet

2 Comments Posted by on October 16, 2009

I’m currently reading the new book on design thinking from IDEO’s Tim Brown called Change By Design. (Full review coming soon.) The design thinking philosophy was first introduced to me, and to Red Hat throughout the company, by David Burney. In comparing traits associated with design thinking collaboration and collaboration in the open source community, [...]

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Building brand through storytelling: Seven elements great stories have in common

1 Comment Posted by on October 13, 2009

Here’s a quick story: A friend of mine and I had stopped at a gas station for a soda on a summer afternoon. I was probably about 10 years old. As we were drinking, I was mindlessly tearing the plastic label off my bottle and shredding it into pieces. He watched me do this for [...]

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