Red Hat CEO Runs His Billion-Dollar Company From This Uber-Modest Office

We've told you that Red Hat is one of the world's biggest "meritocracies," where employees can, and do, call the CEO an idiot to his face, if they don't like his ideas.

CEO Jim Whitehurst is proud of that.

He might be the boss, but in a meritocracy, people have power based on the respect they earn from their peers and once respected, they are entitled to speak their minds.

We also told you that Red Hat is hiring like crazy. It just moved into a new headquarters building in downtown Raleigh, N.C.

In the old building, Whitehurst was working in what he described to us as a "crummy" little office. But the new one, while bigger, isn't any grander.

He knows the difference, too. Whitehurst was once the COO of Delta Airlines working in a huge, grand space.

The new space is an office with a door. He isn't sitting a cubicle a la HP CEO Meg Whitman, or at a desk in the middle of the room a la Mark Zuckerberg. But the space surely doesn't scream CEO of a hot billion-dollar company, either. He just sent us a picture.

New office (note the model airplanes on the cabinets):

Old office that he described as "crummy."