How Open Source Thinking Built a Cutting Edge Business

“It’s not personal, it’s business.” How many times have you heard that phrase throughout your career? For the longest time, business success has gone hand in hand with a certain degree of toughness and ambition. After all, you’ve got competition to worry about, revenue goals to hit, and in many cases, investors to answer to. 

On the turn of a dime, business can become cutthroat. You need to build walls to keep your company secrets safe — because if you don’t, you lose and your competitors win. Even within organizations, there is a tendency to separate processes and people and silo data and keep people in one lane or another.

But what if there was an alternative? 

Elastic believes in that different way, and Kim Huffman, the VP of Global IT at Elastic, is helping the team to lean into the idea that an open, supportive, distributed system is the way forward. While most businesses keep a tight lid on their business by employing an aggressive and impersonal approach, at Elastic, everything is out in the open. With a distributed workforce and an open-source mentality, Elastic is giving everyone access to the most precious resource currently available.  

But scarcity creates value, so when everyone has access to something valuable, is it still worth as much as we think? When everyone can win, does anyone really win? And with so much out in the open, how is Elastic continuing to innovate in new ways and stay ahead of the curve? Find out on this episode. 

Main Takeaways: 

• A Share of the Pie: With big world problems to solve, open-source and open innovation has proven to have huge potential, especially in a crisis. Embracing a collaborative approach does not only help to solve problems externally, a seed change from the us-vs-them mindset to a collaborative and open approach could promote similar behavior within companies and ultimately end in happier customers.
• Honesty Rules: Most people in senior leadership do not have people who hold a mirror up to them and tell them the truth. If you want the leadership team to grow and work toward the same goals, honesty with no repercussions is the route to building trust. Leaders should encourage openness and honesty and open themselves for feedback.
• Embed Empathy: The dog-eat-dog corporate narrative of the past has given way to the concept of empathy as the secret of business success. It is no longer being regarded as a soft skill.  Human-centric strategies that focus on people first and sharing experiences have become more important.
• People-Centered Resilience: Building a resilient organization or company that can adapt to a crisis is all about the people. Give people the technology tools, information and support to feel engaged and communicate openly and transparently to build trust. With that kind of culture, employees will buy in, feel personally connected, and work hard when the company sees challenging times.

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