Democratic Organization and Management By Paul Bernstein and Lew Bowers

This is an excerpt on the issue of leadership from "extracts and elaborations from the course as co-taught at the New School for Democratic Management" in 1977. This article was photocopied several times before I acquired it, so I am unsure of the source.

"Rather than having no leaders, our vision is to have everyone be a leader. To do that we need to take advantage of our natural leaders as teacher. Leadership is power, and that means the ability, whether physical, mental or moral, to act. We need to move from the idea of a leader to leadership as a resource of the group, just like money, bookkeeping or a truck."

Leadership involves providing necessary information, influence/inspiration, future-orientation, teaching (especially about power) and coordinating. The goal is to understand leadership as a role which any number of people can play. The collective needs to define it share it, and reinforce it whenever it appears."

"Together, we are in the throes of hammering out a new style of leadership. Our new style is an amalgam of traditionally masculine traits like aggressiveness, initiative, attention to task with more traditional feminine proclivities like responsiveness, service and more attention to affect and process. In our collectives we are building a new model of what might be called androgynous leadership."