Second—and obviously—you haven’t owned that idea at the same level. And until you do, it might not prove nearly as effective for you as it has for them.
All of that leads us to this: Leaders who don’t own their ideas are rarely as effective as leaders who do.
Can you own an idea that you didn’t come up with? Of course you can. But usually first you need to:
- Wrestle with it
- Rethink it back to first principles
- Revise it
- Test it
- Adapt it
- Then it’s yours.
Often we steal ideas from different church models because we think they’ll work, but we don’t know why they work.
