I was introduced to a book I am reading, “The Emergence of the Relationship Economy,” by a tweet from Rohan Pinto:

Leadership Is In The Ideas Not The Titles http://t.co/T7KJk0JK

This led me to a compelling article by Jay Deragon, one of the authors of “The Emergence …”.  In this post, Mr. Deragon made a particularly profound statement: 

An idea is an intangible asset that can be used over and over by millions of people, improved on and rapidly shared and consumed.  Abundance of wealth is being created from these intangible assets, ideas.

The concept of a shared idea was also treated by James Gleick in his book, “The Information.”  He quoted Jacques Monod, a French Nobel Prize winning biologist:

Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas.  They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and thanks to global communications, in far distant, foreign brains.

It is this concept of evolving of ideas through sharing that intrigues me.  Although ideas germinate in one person’s mind, it is often in the sharing of those ideas with other people that ideas grow and evolve and transform into powerful concepts that can transform our lives and the world around us.

Relationships between individuals – relationships between identities – provide the environment where seeds of ideas germinate, take root and grow.  Again, although individual identities can have great power, relationships can multiply that power immensely.