Defining Open Source Leadership

Leadership is perhaps one of the most overused and least understood terms of our age. It is probably the most researched topic in organizational behavior and there are more leadership theories than you can poke a stick at, each giving partial answers to highly complex leadership questions. As Nobel Prize-winner Richard Feynman (1994, p. 22) once said:

I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees
of certainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure
about anything and there are many things I know nothing about.

Not bad, coming from a Nobel Prize winner and pretty good advice for those of us crazy enough to seek absolute certainty about a phenomenon that has so many competing theories. There are, however, points where there does appear to be absolute convergence and these are that
leadership is the power of one individual to guide the actions of another. To explain this essential quality that lies at the heart of leadership theory, the story of the great artist and sculptor Michelangelo is helpful as a lens to reflect on the core aspects of open source leadership. We might say that Michelangelo’s capacity to see David in the slab of marble before transforming it into the beautiful shape we see today in Florence, and his ability to foresee such potential lying in the heart of a block of stone rejected by others because of its imperfections are essential qualities
of open source leadership.