Q. You’ve been a strong advocate for “open” organizations as a catalyst for business innovation ever since. Is this type of management style applicable to any business?

A. Yes and no. Traditional organization structures are very good at optimizing in a static environment, when you are trying to orchestrate people to do what you want them to do, and also in a world when those roles don’t have a lot of variance in potential output. You’re just trying to optimize for efficiency, and individual variance in performance doesn’t matter that much.

But in knowledge-based environments where the difference between an average and a great programmer, for example, is 10X, that’s a very different situation. In that environment where you want that 10X, maximizing that discretionary effort to get it is incredibly important. And in an environment that is moving very quickly, you can’t plan and then execute and then optimize around that, while it’s all moving too fast for the plan. You need to have an organization that can self-regulate and react quickly. You need to create an environment where people can execute and make changes as they need to.

Q. How do you achieve that?

A. You have to go to work every day remembering your team is there because they choose to be there and not because they have to. It doesn’t mean you have to be in a sell mode all the time, but if you go in thinking, “I’m a leader because people choose to follow me,” it creates a very different mental dynamic. A leader’s role is to create an environment where people can do their best work, and not to tell them what to do and monitor how they are doing it. That’s how you get the lowest common denominator out of people.

The whole point of an open organization is to relax the constraints of management to create the environment in which your team can do their best work. And what is most important is to cascade this philosophy through every manager in the organization. I know that if something happens to me tomorrow, nothing will change at Red Hat because it’s really built into who we are and what we do.

Another important point is that you have to have a deep belief that a team will come up with a better solution than any individual, including yourself. If you think you have the better answer and just go through the motions, it will never work.

Q. Is it a democracy, then?

A. No. At times I’ve made very unpopular decisions. The key is that you never want to surprise people. So you must engage them first in dialogue. In a traditional model, you have a small number of people making the decision at the top, and then you announce, “This is what we’re doing.” Then the organization doesn’t really do it, so you bring in management consultants to help you do it. And then the C.E.O. says, “This is awful; my organization is resistant to change.”