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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
I think Cynic is spot-on. It seems to be a comparison between the "single innovator" and a collaborative, open innovation group. Sure, there will always be creative and technical geniuses who work mostly on their own and produce things that dazzle us all. But when you get those kind of people to work together with others (of varying skill levels), in the long run, you're going to build better widgets.
So maybe the real question is... beyond the central obvious figure (Jobs)... does Apple keep "genius creators" happy for very long? I can't imagine most innovative, intelligent people would enjoy working in a dictatorship.
I never fully appreciated the value of transparency until I did some contract work for an ad agency that wanted me to avoid disclosing to their clients that I was a contractor, not an employee. It was... awkward. I had to watch my words very carefully, and meetings were incredibly strange--I'd show up at the office and have to remember not to greet the employees as if I hadn't seen them in a while, etc.
Then, the paranoia that I'd market my services to their client meant that my contact with the client was far too limited to effectively provide my services to them.
Ultimately, I chose not to work with the agency again.