Steve Fulling articulated some principles a few years back on business, leadership, and life that he called "We Are the Ten." While the ideas in general were not necessarily original with him, the document was a powerful vision ofhow self-actualized people go about working together. Here is the preamble:

We believe teams are only as good as the values that bond them together. We reject the notion that in a team of one hundred, ten do the work. We are the ten. We believe values and culture can fundamentally transform the behaviors and actions of a team. We reject the idea that policies and procedures can fill the gap of individual accountability and responsibility. We believe that through individual practice and patterning we can break old school techniques that taught disengagement and laziness. To this end, we have identified our cultural values that are necessary in order to successfully become part of the ten.

Dave McNamee, a mutual friend and someone we've both worked with has started blogging about the principles in We Are the Ten in an "every Monday" series. Follow along. I think you'll enjoy it.

Update (March 2015): Dave's blog has disappeared but here's a link to Steve's We Are the Ten document (PDF).