Leveraging the ideas of others

".. become a category killer, one of those that fills its niche so competently that the alternatives [read: competition] are not just discarded but almost forgotten.

.. you can't really aim or plan for a result like this. You have to get pulled into it by design ideas so powerful that afterward the results just seem inevitable, natural, even foreordained. The only way to try for ideas like that is by having lots of ideas—or by having the judgment to take other peoples' good ideas beyond where the originators thought they could go.

Interestingly enough, you will quickly find that if you are completely and self-deprecatingly truthful about how much you owe other people, the world at large will treat you as though you did every bit of the invention yourself and are just being becomingly modest about your innate genius.

it is not critical that [you] be able to originate designs of exceptional brilliance, but it is absolutely critical to recognize good design ideas from others.

You [also] need to attract people, interest them in what you're doing, and keep them happy about the amount of work they're doing. Technical sizzle will go a long way towards accomplishing this, but it's far from the whole story. The personality you project matters, too. To make [this] work, it helps enormously if you have at least a little skill at charming people.

But what [about] leadership style? They cannot be based on power relationships—and even if they could be, leadership by coercion would not produce the results we see. Weinberg quotes the autobiography of the 19th-century Russian anarchist Pyotr Alexeyvich Kropotkin's Memoirs of a Revolutionist to good effect on this subject:

Having been brought up in a serf-owner's family, I entered active life, like all young men of my time, with a great deal of confidence in the necessity of commanding, ordering, scolding, punishing and the like. But when, at an early stage, I had to manage serious enterprises and to deal with [free] men, and when each mistake would lead at once to heavy consequences, I began to appreciate the difference between acting on the principle of command and discipline and acting on the principle of common understanding. The former works admirably in a military parade, but it is worth nothing where real life is concerned, and the aim can be achieved only through the severe effort of many converging wills.

The severe effort of many converging wills is precisely what [is required]. To operate and compete effectively, [you] have to learn how to recruit and energize effective communities of interest in the mode vaguely suggested by Kropotkin's principle of understanding."

- Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar.