by 
I love nothing more than a good story. During his closing keynote at the HR Technology Conference, Jim Whitehurst (CEO of RedHat) shared a powerful story from his days working at Delta Airlines. As I wrote in this post, those days weren’t so great:
“You’ve just announced that Delta Airlines is filing for bankruptcy. For weeks, you’ve been talking to investors about the strategy and solution, and the announcement to Wall Street goes as well as expected. In each presentation you inform the audience that eventually all frontline mechanical jobs will be outsourced.
Now imagine, after an intense day of press conferences and presentations, you get a call requesting that you meet with the late shift. You accept the invitation and when you show up you find yourself standing in front of 200 mechanics–those same people who will eventually lose their jobs as part of the bankruptcy agreement.
When you arrive at the hangar, you’re not sure what to say. Ultimately, you decide to share all of the same details of the strategy and solution with the frontline that you shared with investors, banks, and the media.”
Read more about what Jim did, what happens, and why he recommends building an open organization in my post, Unleashing the Power of Openness, published in O.C. Tanner’s ‘a magazine’
