>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and 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 happy to welcome to 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 on. >> 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. Yeah as I said, you just moved from Red Hat you are now an IBM-er, wearing the corporate blue, nice job. But still no tie. Oh, of course we know your style there. But Jim, want to ask you when the pandemic rolled out what was your first move as a leader? >> Well, first move was to get the team together and bond as a team. So much of traditional management is about grooving a set of routines and then driving those to drive efficiency in them. Got 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, first off you want to recognize the human elements 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 no something that you'd go hire a consultant to do in two weeks. So, bringing the team together and 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. I think this is, we talked 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 is the time to do it. >> Yeah, I would often quote Clay Christensen and I believe he said, strategy is something that you don't write it in stone. It's something that you must look at a certain point in time and make changes. And when we talked about cloud adopting 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 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 you'll soon hear in the next week or two, see it on GitHub. We've created a, I'm going to think of it as contract. What we expect, our expectations around working home including it's okay to have bad hair days and... We've got a whole set of kind of ways of working that we really crowd sourced inside of IBM in a very kind of open source type way. It wasn't something we dictated from the top and all the entire senior team is now committed to that. And we are planning on putting it out on GitHub as well, so if others find value in it. But a lot 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 backup and say, hey you have to figure some of this out and tell us what you need to do to be successful. >> Yeah. What you just talked about with GitHub is some the silver linings, if you will of what's been happening here. The communities we live have always been collaborative in nature. 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, whether it is 3D printing items 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're through the immediate threat? >> Yeah, yeah we've talked about this a lot at open source is this idea of reciprocity. That 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. 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 large corporate organizations around the world where it became a little more nameless, faceless and so we're in business to make a profit. And--Milton Freidman--if you do that, that's good for society. And I think we've all already started and the business round table actually did this 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 everyday to serve out customers? What else can we do to add value? And I think that's something certainly I don't think just senior leaders are doing. I've gotten dozens of emails from IBM-ers 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. Or why do we exist beyond purely a for profit mechanism? And I know that theory around, well if we profit maximize society is better off. But I do think rounding that out with a little bit more of a since that weaken having 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 has a COVID button on it so you can see down to your county level the number of people infected and that bubbled up, that went to top down Arvind or me saying, let's go do that. And so, I do think that having broadly people in corporations think about well what role do I play in society is a really, really helpful thing. >> Yeah, so I'm glad you actually brought up weather because we 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 going places that they hadn't been before. So, I'm wondering if there's any lessons learned or things that we can do from a global climate standpoint that we've learned as a part of what has happened. >> Well, my view is that there are two major benefits in this crisis associated with environment. Not even need to say benefits. There are two lessons learned that I think could 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, oh well what can I do? Does it really matter? Aren't we too far gone? I've heard often, well there's nothing we can do we're just down a 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 we'll 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 a sustainable change and outcomes in the environment. >> Well, Jim Whitehurst, always a pleasure to get an update from you. Thank you so much for sharing how you, your peers and the community are handling these challenging time. >> Hey 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. Check out theCUBE.net for all the events upcoming interviews and archives, including lots with Jim Whitehurst in the past. Thank you for watching. (calm music)