For Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, being open for business has its own shade of meaning.

Van Leeuwen is CEO of SUSE, a provider of software solutions for enterprise and cloud. SUSE, whose clients include 60% of the Fortune 500, is open-source. Its business model gives van Leeuwen and his team a bigger purpose than just selling software, while also building trust with customers. 

SUSE creates products by collaborating on projects with the open-source community of programmers. The resulting software is available for anyone to use, change, and share. 

So rather than peddle software licenses, SUSE makes money by selling subscriptions to enterprise-grade versions of, say, the Linux operating system, plus support, updates, security patches, and other services. Customers also have the choice of using multiple hardware and cloud vendors. 

For clients, van Leeuwen compares it to switching mobile providers while still keeping your number and all the data on your phone. “We help them across all of these environments to have a single pane of glass, effectively, as a single way of managing things, without having to commit 100% to one single vendor,” he tells me from London. 

“And we’ve all seen last Friday, also, how risky it is to be dependent on one single vendor,” van Leeuwen adds. 

No kidding. He means the CrowdStrike disaster, which saw a faulty software update by the cybersecurity giant crash millions of Windows computers worldwide.

Van Leeuwen is a big believer in open-source as a driver of innovation. 

“There are smarter ways of capitalizing on the usage of software than copyrighting it or licensing it in the old-fashioned way,” he says. “All the latest and greatest trends in the internet, all the way through AI, find their roots in open-source, in learning from each other’s technology rather than hiding it and not showing how you did it.”

SUSE builds trust with customers because it focuses on their success by ensuring they have a working, stable solution in the fast-changing world of open-source, van Leeuwen explains. If there is an issue, the company can swiftly address it. 

And it might sound counterintuitive, but van Leeuwen cites the security advantages of open-source. “If you want something to be secure and to be safe, the more people look at it, the more people challenge it, the better the quality will be,” he says. “That’s the open-source model. It’s not like you operate in isolation and a few people can make a decision.”

Van Leeuwen, who joined SUSE last year after almost two decades at rival Red Hat, sees an organizational model there too. Open source is a meritocracy because the best solution wins, he says. Van Leeuwen wants the same at SUSE, whose key values are trust, freedom, accountability, and transparency. “If you put meritocracy to work in an organization, you flatten the hierarchy and you create a world in which people with great ideas are being listened to.”

All 2,500 or so employees around the world are free to speak up, van Leeuwen notes. “This gives purpose to people, because you then have something to go to work for and to feel good about,” he says. “You’re participating in a fair environment where your contribution counts for what it is and not for who you are or where you come from.”

Van Leeuwen and his leadership team build trust by being transparent. “If we need to make a decision around anything, we will put it on the table,” he says. “And trust me, people are very vocal—they give a lot of input. But that’s also because they feel safe.”

For leaders who want to follow suit, van Leeuwen suggests checking your ego and matching words with actions. “When you are true to what you say you will do, you get a lot more credit, you build a lot more trust.”

It’s an open-and-shut case.

Nick Rockel
[email protected]

IN OTHER NEWS

Striking out
Shawn Henry knows how quickly people can lose trust in a business. CrowdStrike’s chief security officer apologized for the cybersecurity firm’s recent software meltdown, which paralyzed countless businesses. Henry also noted that the confidence his company had spent years building took just hours to evaporate. His words came too late for customers such as Elon Musk, who posted about deleting CrowdStrike. Sorry, no second chances there.

Me time
Narcissistic CEOs know how to win the trust of corporate directors, a new study reveals. By examining transcripts of board meetings, researchers concluded that such execs tend to cast discussions of risk-taking in a positive light, persuading directors to take more chances. Chalk up their bravado to self-importance—but also to a need for attention and personal gain. They sometimes stack boards with admirers and pushovers, too. Yes, of course.

Clearing the desks
Want to keep your female employees? Better start trusting them to work wherever they want. That’s the message from research by freelancing platform Upwork, which found that nearly two-thirds of C-suite leaders at U.S. businesses with RTO mandates have seen a disproportionate share of women quit. America had a problem expanding its female workforce before the pandemic, too, with growth mostly flat over the past 30 years.

Financial trouble
Yikes. When the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency assessed the 22 big banks it oversees, 11 reportedly had inadequate or weak management of operational risks such as tech screwups, natural disasters, and employee blunders. The U.S. regulator rated one-third of them three or worse out of five for overall management, ringing alarm bells after last year’s record bank failures. Leave it to the nation’s large financial institutions to make a case for crypto.

TRUST EXERCISE

“There is now near-universal recognition of the importance of generative AI. Most CEOs I meet with believe that it has the potential to reinvent not only their organizations, but every industry. Generative AI is set to transform the workforce, but companies can unlock the value of Gen AI only if they use it in ways that generate consumer, employee, and stakeholder trust and put human well-being first.

Taking a people-centric approach is crucial. As part of this new era of reinvention, organizations will need to focus on reinventing their workforce at all levels, from fully understanding Gen AI at a leadership level to providing workers with the skills they need to work with the technology in their particular area of the business.”

You can’t walk far without hearing about responsible AI. Manish Sharma, CEO of the Americas at Accenture, envisions a future where businesses prize people over the technology. In North America, taking such an approach with gen AI at scale could boost the economy by $2.7 trillion over the next 15 years, his firm’s research shows.

The future is anyone’s guess, but Sharma outlines four steps to make that happen. First, he calls on business leaders to build trust, partly by showing employees, customers, and other stakeholders that their organization uses AI responsibly. Companies must also reinvent how they work, Sharma says, and reshape their workforce. Finally, leaders need to prepare their people for AI, taking care to strengthen trust by listening to them.

For Sharma, it’s all about investing in people, which goes against the grain of the current rush to spend on gen AI instead. Although disruption of humans’ working lives is inevitable, AI does hold the promise of changed and new roles for those who reskill and upskill. The big question is whether business leaders will follow through—and who will hold them responsible if they don’t.