Michel Bauwens explains "leaderfulness" as flexible leadership distribution, not hierarchy or pure flatness. He uses Linux as an example of how distributed teams work with maintainers who protect project integrity. Overly flat organizations often end up with hidden elites making all decisions anyway.
Chapters
I'd like to bring in this old analogy that, I mean, it's not new, but I think it's very important to think about this. They used to say that the new management was the jazz band structure. Right? So if you have like a free jazz band, there's not one leader. There is, depending on the context and the moment, you know, the trumpet will take the lead or the drummer. And so you have this fruit distributed leadership. And I think that's an important notion because we cannot be completely against hierarchy. There are skill differences, there are wisdom differences, And I think that the idea is to create an organization that is flexible so that rather than leaderlessness, you achieve leaderfulness. The, you know, the capacity according to context for the right people to be able to take the lead for the moment. And so if you look at the history of humanity until 5,000 years ago, this was pretty much how things worked. So if there was a war, and they had wars, you know, there would be a war chief. Why? Because, you know, your life is at stake. You want a person in charge that knows how to conduct battle. You don't want to discuss, you know, with people who don't know how to do this, right? But then after the battle, the person went back to his farming gear and was just a farmer. And then the shaman was somebody who had studied plants and from a teacher. So, and they had all these techniques that constantly redistributed, and there's some good books about it. I really like, for example, Societies Without a State from Pierre Clastres, where he shows what the Native Americans in South America were doing to constantly redistribute power concentration, and they were successful. For a very, very long time, but not, you know, then it changed. And I think what has changed now, so the way I see history is we were, you know, we lived in kinship relationships, so everybody's your uncle, your aunt, you know, you live in small villages, you can talk, you can talk about everything and solve your issues through dialogue and you know, the elders coming together. Once we got into bigger entities, you know, hierarchy simplified communication, and I think the, you know, the big anthropological revolution of networks is the capacity to create small groups that are outside of a particular territory, so we can now have small group dynamics and work together, you know, in a non-territorial scale. And I think this is really important that we can do that. So we can, you take Linux and the average team in Linux is 4 people, right? So yes, it's big, maybe 20, 25,000 people working on it, but they actually work in small teams and that, and they trust each other. So one of the innovations in leadership, which I think is very interesting in the open source communities is that they no longer have a command leadership, but they have a control leadership. And what it means is they have maintainers and editors, and so people that actually are there to protect the integrity of the ecosystem. And there are various ways, in some they are elected, in some they kind of emerge organically, but they have these people who cannot say to anyone, you cannot do this, right? They cannot stop the development and the potential of any person to pursue his passion and his dreams, but they can say this is not good enough for the system because, you know, they use it to go to the moon, so, you know, you can't just have, you know, bugs in the software. So I think this is an interesting evolution of the notion of leadership because I always also think that if you go too flat, you get different problems. For example, I won't name the name, but there's a famous co-op in Spain, and you know, they want to be totally inclusive. This means that the meetings take 7 hours, but by that time there's 3 people left in the meeting and they will take all the decisions, always the same 3 persons, right? So something that appears to be very democratic and inclusive isn't necessarily because of these dynamics. And in that case, it's better actually to say that there is a leadership, there is responsibility, and there are roles, and these people have responsibility and can be, you know, can be accountable for it, right? So it's not so easy. It's finding the right mix between the vertical, the horizontal, the diagonal, and to create complex organic systems.
