MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Five Tips on Avoiding 'Terminal Niceness': Former Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst

In cultures where people are terminally nice, no one questions leaders — which can be the death of the business. Whitehurst shares pragmatic advice on building a culture of open debate.

As the chief operating officer responsible for leading Delta Airlines through bankruptcy in 2005, Jim Whitehurst worked closely with bankers and lawyers who specialized in helping distressed companies. He learned that those bankruptcy advisers used the expression terminally nice to describe clients whose cultures avoided difficult but necessary discussions. “Cultures that are terminally nice,” Whitehurst observed, “are so nice that you never have the hard conversations — and you never make the hard changes until you go into bankruptcy.”

When Whitehurst joined open-source software pioneer Red Hat as CEO in 2007, he encountered a culture that prized vigorous debate. In his second week with the company, when the CTO and the engineering team were briefing him on the technology strategy, an engineer interrupted to say that the stated strategy was short-sighted, betting on the wrong technology, and doomed to fail, sparking a massive argument among the team. At Delta, Whitehurst recalled, the engineer would have been fired for publicly contradicting senior management, but at Red Hat, the CTO thanked him for raising the concerns.

About the Author

Donald Sull (@culturexinsight) is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a cofounder of CultureX. Charles Sull is a cofounder of CultureX.

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