I cringe when I hear people in any organization discussing “our experts know the best”, or generally advocating a top down, command and control approach. Paul Graham recently wrote a wonderful article on the lessons we can learn from “Open Source”. He refers to open source software and blogging among other avocations. Graham includes three lessons from the open source and blogging worlds:

• People work harder on stuff they like
• The standard office environment is very unproductive
• Bottome up often works better than top-down.

Graham is a technologist and investor.