Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times.   Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Jim Whitehurst is president and C.E.O. of Red Hat, the provider of Linux and other open-source technology. Long before the Facebook era, he says, the company started forms of social media where all employees could air views on issues.

To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.

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The Memo List: Where Everyone Has an Opinion

Bryant: Tell me about the culture of your company.

Whitehurst:  Since we were founded in the 1990s on the idea of leveraging broad open-source communities, we naturally adopted that approach in our culture long before the Facebooks of the world even existed. So we’re on the bleeding edge of what so many companies are going to face because of this whole millennial generation coming up. It just does not like this idea of hierarchy.

Bryant:   So what do you do? What have you learned?

Whitehurst:  One is that if you really want innovation to happen, you almost have to think about it as an ecosystem. A lot of companies think that the way to be more innovative is to put a group of creative people together. But your most creative ideas are going to come from people on the front lines who see a different way of doing the jobs they do every day. You have to create vehicles for those ideas to be heard. So the question is, how do you make that happen? How do you engage your employees? And what we do is to use social media internally.

Bryant:  Tell me more about that.

Whitehurst:  This is an interesting point — a lot of people think that using social media for engagement means you’re somehow creating a democracy, or at least consensus. But we have a culture of meritocracy, not democracy. And the difference between meritocracy and democracy is night and day.

We let debate happen, and you let it kind of burn its way out, with people offering their opinions on both sides of an issue. And then you say: “We’ve listened to all of this. We’ve taken it into consideration and here’s what we’re going to do.” Even the most ardent people opposing whatever decision is ultimately made will at least think: “I had my say. You heard me, and you told me why you made the decision.” It does not have to be a democracy. And this has been true at Red Hat since long before I got there.

Our employees have always expected this: tell me why we’re doing what we’re doing, and allow me at least a voice in the decision process. Now a voice doesn’t mean decision rights. It doesn’t mean you have any say in the answer. But at least you have a vehicle for an opinion to be heard.

A lot of the issues that many companies are now facing is that they think, “I can’t let my employees have a seat at the table in this.” But it’s not about having a seat at the table for the decision. It’s about having a seat at the table to voice their opinions and make sure those opinions are heard.

As long as our employees are involved they will accept virtually any decision. They may say, “We don’t like it, and we still don’t agree with that.” But you listen and you come back with a well-reasoned answer. And that is the expectation that our employees have. I think almost every company is going to have to deal with this over the next 20 years.

Bryant:  And the name of your internal forum?

Whitehurst:  We call it Memo List.

Bryant:  And so how many people will be on that on any given day?

Whitehurst:  We have about 4,000 employees, but on average you’ll see a couple hundred posts a day. And that doesn’t include the Friday List, which is a separate site where all the funny things are. Memo List is about the business. And I go through it every single day. I would say probably three-quarters of the people are on it every day, either reading or posting.

Bryant:   Isn’t that time-consuming for the company?

Whitehurst:  Here’s the simple way I would put it: Engaging people in how decisions are getting made means it can take forever to get decisions made. But once you make a decision, you get flawless execution because everybody’s engaged. They know what you’re doing and they know why you’re doing it.

It’s a very different model than what happens in most companies, which is that a small group of senior people make decisions, and then execution is difficult. I’m not saying we’re perfect by any stretch, but by the time we’ve actually come to an agreement on where we’re heading, we’re halfway there.

Bryant:  You mentioned the Friday List. What are some funny things that have shown up there?

Whitehurst:  Somebody will park and take up two spaces, and then another employee who sees this will take a picture, post it, and write, “Really? Did you have to do that?” Or someone will leave a mess in a conference room, and somebody will take a picture and write: “Hey, come on! Your mother’s not here to clean up after you.” It’s interesting because behavior in the company becomes self-policing.

Bryant:  What’s an example of something you worked through on the Memo List?

Whitehurst:  We used it to create our mission statement. A lot of companies will either hire an external firm or have a management off-site meeting where, over a couple of good bottles of wine, 10 people do this. It took us five months to do our mission statement because we did it from the bottom up. We took in every idea. We had debates. We had work groups. It changed, and it was modified and tweaked. But by the time we finished, everybody — even if they don’t agree with it — knows our mission statement and the subtleties of every word.

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Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times’ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. In his new book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews with more than 70 leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here. To contact him, please click here.