Books

The Open Organization community maintains a collaboratively written, evolving library of materials for understanding, exploring, and building next-generation organizations. To download alternate formats, edit the books, translate an installment, or contribute to the series, join the Open Organization community on GitHub.

Perspectives

Open Perspectives is a series of short, timely publications featuring voices from our community of experts on open organizational culture, design, and leadership as they explore what they consider the most pertinent and pressing issues facing modern organizations.

Opening Up to Leadership Talent

In Opening Up to Leadership Talent, organizational transformation, leadership guide, and Open Organization Ambassador Jos Groen explains how open principles can serve as the foundation for talent management—particularly in hybrid organizations transitioning from conventional organizational structures and cultures to open ones.

In Opening Up Social Impact-Focused Organizations, authors Laura Hilliger and Heather Leson pool their years of experience in non-profit, humanitarian, and social impact-focused organizations, offering guidance for leaders working to transform their organizations with open principles in mind. With advice that’s both refreshingly realistic and eminently practical, Laura and Heather explain how working openly can help advocates for social change build coalitions, create projects that respect communities’ values, and architect durable movements with far-reaching impacts.

Guides

Guides are collaboratively written, multi-author works collecting numerous voices in conversation about a single topic.

Guide to Distributed Teamwork

Human at a Distance is an open organization guide to distributed teamwork. It explores how open principles and practices can help organizations foster collaboration, increase transparency, enhance accountability, and establish a greater degree of trust while their members are geographically separated. It offers distributed teams (those working remotely for the first time, as well as those with extensive remote-work experience) a guide to building dynamic and inclusive organizations—no matter where their members happen to be.

Guide to IT Culture Change

In The Open Organization Guide to IT Culture Change, more than 25 contributors from open communities, companies, and projects offer hard-won lessons and practical advice for creating an open IT department—one that can deliver better, faster results and unparalleled business value.

Guide for Educators

What if we could build classrooms, departments, or entire educational institutions on the same values that power open source communities? What if we let open organization principles guide our experiments in transforming education? How might that change the ways educators prepare students for life in an increasingly open world? In The Open Organization Guide for Educators, more than two dozen advocates for open education explore these important questions.

Core volumes

Core volumes are the backbone of the Open Organization project’s library. They contain key definitions, helpful resources, useful activities, and informative case studies organizations can use to become more open—no matter their size or mission.

The Open Organization Field Guide

The Open Organization Field Guide is a community-produced companion to Jim Whitehurst’s initial thoughts on the future of work, management, and leadership. The book collects cutting-edge ideas about the ways open source values are changing the ways we work, manage, and lead.

The Open Organization Leaders Manual

The Open Organization Leaders Manual is a handbook for anyone attempting to harness the power of openness to lead teams that are more transparent, agile, collaborative, and mission-driven. Newly revised and significantly expanded in its second edition, this book is for anyone interested in building more transparent, agile, collaborative, and mission-driven organizations.

The Open Organization Workbook

The Open Organization Workbook features contributions from more than 30 managers, educators, technologists, consultants, and other experts, who offer concrete and actionable strategies for putting the principles of transparency, inclusivity, adaptability, collaboration, and community into practice.

License

Volumes in the Open Organization book series are licensed via Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. See individual volumes for more specific licensing details.