Fast Company | How Google Grows...and Grows...and Grows:
"The challenge is negotiating the tension between risk and caution. When Rosing started at Google in 2001, 'we had management in engineering. And the structure was tending to tell people, No, you can't do that.' So Google got rid of the managers. Now most engineers work in teams of three, with project leadership rotating among team members. If something isn't right, even if it's in a product that has already gone public, teams fix it without asking anyone."

I've read a lot of blogs lately discussing leadership in the emerging church. Looks to me like Google is on to something. It's the idea that "Great People Can Manage Themselves."

It appears that much of the church today fits the MO of "no, you can't do that." I know in the PCUSA it is really like that!

Emerging churches will and do have a very different leadership model. Google does it with teams of three. 1 Corinthians 14:26 talks about this in our corporate worship: "What then shall we say, brothers? When you come together, everyone has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. All of these must be done for the strengthening of the church."

Craig Blomberg in his commentary on 1 Corinthians states: "If gifts are given to every believer for the corporate edification of the gathered community, then there must be opportunities for church members to exercise those gifts in public worship."

Blomberg continues by quoting Chafin: "If Paul were writing the average congregation today, his advice would have to work the other side of the street. Rather than an unstructured spontaneity that creates bedlam, he would be confronted with a well-regulated order of worship that often creates boredom. The smallest of churches often prints or mimeographs for its members a program of everything that is going to happen during the hour and the sequence in which it will take place, and once it has been printed it becomes a sacred thing to those who planned it. And the likelihood of the Spirit's leading anyone to say or do something that was not anticipated on Tuesday when the stencil was cut is very remote."

Blomberg warns (and this is perhaps how Paul "negotiating the tension between risk and caution"): "Verses 27-33 remind us, at the same time, that however creative or flexible the structure of worship may be, duly recognized leaders must have the authority to intervene and correct when Scripture is contradicted or disobeyed."

Well, just some thoughts on leadership in the church. Wouldn't you just love to attend a church that had the culture of Google's business as described in this article?