As I study some of the thriving new age organisations, I see many of them successfully nurturing , what I call an open source leadership model, an offshoot of the software model. It is changing the rules of the game, and it is proving to be successful. So, what defines an open source leadership model?

Eric Raymond likens the traditional management models to building a cathedral - a carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation . Here the roles are clearly defined. Roles include people dedicated to leading , people responsible for managing, and people responsible for implementation. There are leaders and then there are followers in this model. However, in an open source leadership model there are no predefined power centers. All team members are treated like coleads and hence are encouraged to voice their opinions.

Here employees are no longer employees, but are partners in progress. They hold the strings to growth as much as any other senior management official. The open source model of operation and decision-making allows concurrent input of different agendas, approaches and priorities, and hence is diagonally opposite from the more closed, centralised models of development.

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