I like to think of ONE: The Art and Practice of Conscious Leadership as an ìopen sourceà project, like the operating software Linux. We have developed the platform ñ the book and it intellectual property and some of the base process tools ñ now we are building a community of passionate souls who are developing the ìadd-onesà and applications in an open-source, co-created manner.

Thirty years ago, Fred Brooks wrote a book called The Mythical Man-Month, often referred to as ìthe bible of software engineeringÃ.†In the December 12, 2006 issue of Fortune, journalist Daniel Roth asks Brooks a question and I think his answer†offers some wise advice for us†as we pioneer a radical way to build this exciting project.

Does the rise of open-source projects like Linux challenge some of your more formal organizing principles?
The advantage of [open source] is early, large-scale testing, with lots of people motivated to find the bugs, and a culture in which people communicate fixes to each other. A second big advantage is that multiple versions of any particular component gets built, and the marketplace votes on them. In many cases one wins out. In many cases, one doesn’t, and different versions circulate. That’s confusing, and you get compatibility issues. This model clearly works best when the builders are the clients.

So the question I ask is, Would you want to build an air-traffic-control system that way? The answer is no. That task requires a tighter degree of integration. Whereas when the community is building tools for itself, it’s advantageous to have different people, with different ideas of what they want to build, build it, and then let the market vote. Also, as an economic model, the hard problem is how to compensate people. The reward here is prestige. There’s no mechanism for ensuring that the creative get fed.

Letís co-create together in ways that reward us all as ONE ñ members, readers, clients, developers, teachers, consultants, leaders ñ when seen as ONE we can all win.