| Follow @ruhbehka
Raleigh, NC
Rebecca Fernandez is a Principal Program Manager at Red Hat, leading projects to help the company scale its open culture. She's an Open Organization Ambassador, contributed to The Open Organization book, and maintains the Open Decision Framework. She is interested in the intersection of open source principles and practices, and how they can transform organizations for the better.
Authored Comments
work this way, just that I have rarely seen these actions go unrewarded, and that it does happen a lot.
I've often wondered if it's part of the reason that women (statistically) don't rise up the corporate ladder at the same rate as men; we're socially conditioned against both self-promotion and hurting other people's feelings. (Though admittedly I missed most of that conditioning somehow.)
In any case, I think the introduction of money cannot help but change things, and that would be the obvious problem with looking to the (free) open source world for examples. I'm more interested in how companies that pay for open source make that transition without significant culture changes, especially as the company grows and the open source developers are outnumbered by new hires in sales, marketing, HR, etc.
It's not that I haven't seen examples of people NOT doing these things; it's that examples of people doing them--and being rewarded for it--seem rampant.
I hadn't thought of it through that specific lens.
I guess my question would be... is it fixable? How?
And yes, I agree that it's rarely an "evil" person who does these things. It may well be that a flaw in the structure or system encourages the behavior.
On the other hand, we're all capable of rationalizing to extraordinary degrees. I remember hearing an NPR interview with a normal, nice guy arrested for white collar crime. It's been too long for me to remember the specifics but he basically explained how he just allowed his thinking to become distorted to the point that he could do something that sent him away to jail for years. And as we've seen from the epidemic of white collar crime, when people are in a situation where doing the wrong thing seems understandable or more rewarding than the right, it doesn't lead to positive outcomes. :)
But we also know from behavioral economics that humans don't often act rationally, despite our own beliefs. We'll pour more money into an expensive but failed project rather than admit defeat, etc. So it may be difficult to understand our own behavior at times, let alone someone else's.