Howie: interesting response given what we experienced together earlier this past year.

What Andrew is provocating here isn’t the idea that one is ‘capable of being led’ per se, or necessarily that vision and leadership are separate (they aren’t really), but that commitment is what drives any form of leadership. In this sense, you can forge your own path with an aligned vision, and be self-responsible, which then enables functions such as self-management, as one example. Another way of looking at this is that leadership is a distributive attribute held within a group of people, such that each person leads in his or her own ways as a participant in a higher purpose.

This is what we are supporting in our own startup, and what we are seeing as we co-design opportunities with partners in our network. Borrowing from the Ten Bears/Josey Wales exchange, it is a commitment to something other than what is expected or assumed that requires a different kind of leadership capacity, and why Josey’s proposition is successful. While Josey stands in his own power, the reality is that his way of being a enables others in his group to step into their own power as well. That is the hallmark of leadership.

Happy New Year…