Value for Money: Executive Talent

Red Hat hires its new CEO from Delta Airlines. Wow...why go outside the tech industry? Partly because Jim Whitehurst will bring fresh ideas, partly because he knows how to run a lean operation (the way Delta has been the last few years) and partly because he is a closet geek. "He was running Fedora Core 6 and Fedora Core 7 at home. He was running Slackware at home and he was an experienced software developer..."

What was more interesting was this quote from the current CEO, Matthew Szulik on potential candidates from larger vendors ""When you take them out of the big buildings, without the imprimatur of Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Oracle, or HP around them, they just didn't hold up."

He is confirming recent CIO Insight survey on the customer views on value for money from big tech vendors and those about innovation in the Booz Allen annual survey. The bigger vendor executives live in the high SG&A, high margin and low R&D world. They can move within that world, but have a harder time transitioning to disruptive vendors and their much more frugal sales structures and partner ecosystems.