 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a special CUBE Conversation. We've been doing a CXO series, talking to leaders around the industry, how they are dealing with the global pandemic. Really happened to welcome the program. Jim Whitehurst, he is the former CEO of Red Hat. He is now the president of IBM. Jim, pleasure to see you. Thanks so much for joining us. Hey, it's great to be on. Thanks for having me. All right, so Jim, we talk about change in this industry an awful lot. You, of course, went through a lot of professional change recently. You've got the plaque behind you for the largest software acquisition in industry history, of course, Red Hat getting bought by IBM. In the midst of everything happening in the globe, you got a new title. As I said, you just moved from Red Hat. You are now an IBMmer wearing the corporate blue. Nice job, but still no tie, of course. We know your style there. But Jim, want to ask you with, you know, when the pandemic rolled out, what was your first move as a leader? Well, first move was to get the team together and bond, you know, as a team. You know, so much of traditional management is about, you know, grooving a set of routines and then driving those to drive efficiency in them. Trying to take variance out because that's what drives efficiency. But this is a whole new thing. It's a whole new change. And so, you know, first off, you want to recognize the human element and the stress related to it. But you also want to open it up saying, okay, well, what are we going to do? How are we going to work? And so that's not something that you go, are a consultant to do in two weeks. So, you know, bringing the team together and, you know, really saying, okay, what do we all think? How do we actually go about running this? Really was the first thing we did at Red Hat and we did the same thing at IBM. We talk so much about the traditional management structures really weren't built for rapid change and resilience. Well, guess what? We're right in the middle of rapid change, uncertainty and resilience right now. So if there's ever a time to change how we lead, now's the time to do it. Yeah, I would often quote Clay Christensen. And I believe he said, you know, strategy is something that, you know, you don't, you know, write it in stone. It's something that you must look at at a certain point in time and make changes. And when we talked about like cloud adoption, it's like, okay, let me make a strategy, but let's revisit it every quarter. These days it's let's get the team together a couple times a week because what we did a week or a month ago is not the same as today. So how do you make decisions today? And how do you continue to iterate and communicate with the team to deal with what's happening in the field? Well, right now we're having multiple meetings with teams a week, with my team, and then, you know, kind of rippling it out from there. We've asked everyone to commit to having, well, face-to-face video conference, so not just phone calls with their teams multiple times a week and ripple that out. We've actually, and hopefully soon here the next week or two, see it on GitHub, we've created a, almost think of it as a contract. What we expect are expectations around work at home, including, you know, it's okay to have bad hair days and, you know, but a whole set of kind of ways of working that we really crowdsourced inside of IBM in a very kind of open source type way. It wasn't something we dictated from the top and, you know, all the entire senior team is now committed to that and we're planning on putting out on GitHub as well. So if others find value in it. But a lot of it really does start to recognize it's hard to know the stresses that people are under or what they need to do to be effective. And so it's the perfect time to back up and say, hey, you have to figure some of this out and tell us what you need to be successful. Yeah, what you just talked about with GitHub is some of the silver linings, if you will, of what's been happening here. The communities we live have always been collaborative in nature, you know, open source is something that you expect people to be able to come together. But it really is something that we've seen highlighted some of the good cases with, you know, whether it is, you know, 3D printing items, you know, leveraging open source projects to the like. I'm curious, and we know it is early days, but are there any things that you're seeing from a cultural standpoint from a, that you believe will be permanent after we are through the immediate threat? Yeah, you know, I think, we talked about this a lot in open source is this idea of reciprocity that, you know, transactions in an economy don't have to be so quid pro quo, I give you this, you give me that. Things like goodwill matter, you know, things like reputation matter. And certainly that's true in open source communities. And I do think we went through a period of time in, you know, large corporate organizations around the world where it became a little more nameless, faceless. And so, you know, we're a business to, you know, make a profit and, you know, mill the freedom if you do that, that's good for society. I think we've all already started the business round table actually did this, you know, a few months ago, but I think this is causing all businesses to back up and say, what role do we play in society? And what can we do more than what we do every day to serve our customers? You know, what else can we do to add value? And I think, you know, that's something, certainly I don't think just senior leaders are doing. I've gotten dozens of emails from IBMers with the ideas of how to go do this. And I think it does really cause you in a good way to back up and say, why do we exist as a firm, right? And I hope everyone's doing that. All right, why do we exist beyond purely a for-profit mechanism? And I know the theory around, well, if we all profit maximize society is better off, but I do think rounding that out with a little bit more of a, you know, sense that we can have a direct purpose beyond profit is something that certainly great companies have always talked about, IBM's always talked about it. But this is a time it feels real. It feels personal. It feels like right now, what do we do this week and next week? I don't know if you saw this, but how quickly within a matter of days, the Weather Channel app, which is an IBM app, had to take COVID button on it. So you can see down to your county level, you know, the number of people that's infected. And, you know, that bubbled up. That wasn't a top down, you know, Arvin or me saying, let's go do that. And so I do think that having, I think broadly people in corporations think about what role do I play in societies are really, really helpful thing. Yeah, so I'm glad you actually brought up weather because I want to talk for a second about climate. You wrote a very thoughtful piece for Earth Day. It's been really interesting to see how the planet is doing without as many humans around. I've heard things from cities in Italy that are talking about city centers will never let cars back in. There are landscapes that are more beautiful than ever. There are wild animals, you know, going places that they hadn't been for. So I'm wondering if there's any lessons learned or things that we can do from a global climate standpoint that, you know, we learn as a part of what has happened. Well, yeah, my view is that there are two major benefits in this crisis associated with environment. I even need to say benefits. There are two lessons learned that I think can be durable. First off, I think it is inspirational to see how quickly the environment can bounce back. So if you kind of get this like, well, what can I do? Does it really matter? Aren't we too far gone? I think there's a, I've heard often it's like, well, you know, there's nothing we can do. We're just down an irreversible path. I think this shows how quickly change can happen. And I hope in that people derive inspiration because I do think that's important to realize our actions can have benefits. I think that's important. And then I think secondly, again, back to this point of, as organizations reflect on their role beyond just profit making, I'm hoping those two things can link up and we will come out of this with fundamental changes. I think we're all learning that we can work in different ways and we can still get work done. And so we bring those things together. I'm really hopeful that as a society and as individual companies will back up and say, hey, we can impact the environment. We know we can work in some ways differently. How do we bring that together to bring about sustainable change and outcomes in the environment? Well, Jim Whitehurst, always a pleasure to get an update from you. Thank you so much for chairing how you, your peers in the community are handling these challenging times. I always enjoy our conversations. Thanks so much for having me. And I look forward to seeing you soon. All right. Thank you for watching this Cube Conversation. I'm Stu Miniman. And as always, check out the cube.net for all of the events, upcoming interviews and archives, including lots with Jim Whitehurst and the path. Thank you for watching.