How to lead the unleadable
Published: 08 Feb 2008 15:15 GMT
How do you lead people you don't pay and can't sack? This might seem a question for vicars and politicians rather than a technologist working at the cutting edge of practical IT, but the open-source movement has always had people playing all three roles.
Linus Torvalds is one such person. Which makes the question "what happens when you leave?" such a good one, especially now that Bill Gates is getting ready to polish his gold watch. Torvalds' reply is typical: when asked about himself, he's self-effacing, self-confident, untroubled. He says that, while he doesn't think anyone can do what he does as well as him, it won't matter when he stops doing it.
That apparent paradox is at the heart of open source's success. Projects live or die by their leaders, here as elsewhere; SourceForge.net is full of abandoned hulks, driven aground when their captains jumped ship. Even large, ambitious programs can fail through dissent or creeping apathy — both symptoms of failed leadership by no means unknown in the proprietary world. There, though, you can always buy a new one.
So how can anything as big and important as Linux survive, without the enormous framework of money, motivation and control on which commercial companies are built? It is open, important and democratic. It attracts skilled people who see such things as rewarding in themselves, who know that authority derives from consensus and that consensus among their peers can only come from exceptional work.
It's not that there's no internal politics — quite the opposite — in open source, nor that it depends on teams of saints who have somehow transcended the normal operating procedures of humanity in all its egotistical, status-driven, irrational majesty. It's that there is nowhere to hide: you can't disguise a bad idea nor secretly appropriate a good one — not for long, anyway.
Machiavelli would be horrified. But the result is teams where the members naturally complement each other, because they're proud of what they do, while being totally aware of each member's unique role. Everyone has the chance, motivation and capability to learn in the best way possible, by watching someone do a job well and without any veils of protocol or operational secrecy. When the time comes for someone to move on, the pool of talent available to take over the job will be wide-ranging, well understood and already in place.
In this respect, open source has the same anthropology as science. It taps into the same iconoclastic forces that bubble up when you have to follow the truth. Nobody leads science; it has its stars and its fools, its mistakes and successes, but the work transcends them. Torvalds has shown that in IT, as in science, it is the community of minds that produces greatness — a realisation that transcends leadership, that is in itself the leader for all.
Did you find this article useful?
724 out of 726 people found this useful
- Share this article:
