I’m working on a project that for now we will call A Guide to Relationship Based Leadership. I’m looking for you to submit answers to the following questions. Please feel free to send me an email, answer in the comments section or use the Contact form - if you’re willing to share. Thanks!

To frame these questions I want you to think about different parts of your life: could be work, home, volunteer or hobby. In any one (or all) of these parts of your life where do you find yourself – or someone just like you – showing leadership. Particularly when they aren’t in a traditional leadership role (like a manager, elected official, etc.).

1) How do view the idea of a non-traditional leader?

2) What is one example of leadership from a non-traditional position of power that you have experienced?

3) May I follow up with you about your answers?

Thanks ahead of time to those of you willing to participate!

Foursquare is a somewhat popular mobile based application that allows you to “check-in” to locations and provides information about where you are to your friends (or to your larger social networks if you choose) and depending on how often you check-in at any one particular location you can earn points and even real-life rewards from certain businesses.

Right now businesses are taking advantage of this information as a way of luring new customers and rewarding loyal customers. One Facebook friend posted:

Attentive businesses will use this information to their advantage in this way. I think that’s great. There is a problem though – many people are very leery of using a location based application that gives away their position so freely. In fact one enterprising organization – Please Rob Me - is using its cynicism about location based tech to invite would be criminals to watch for when you are away from home.

So what would I look for in a next generation of something like Foursquare? Well, why not put the ownness on businesses to accurately map their location using GPS co-ordinates. By doing this you, as an individual, could sign up for this type of service and just by having your phone enabled the application could pick up on what business you were patronizing. By using an anonymous id businesses could instead push rewards to you instead of waiting for you to announce yourself. Keeping with the anonymous id the application could inform other users of how many people are currently at any given location. This doesn’t mean you would have to make everyone anonymous; like how the applications work now you could allow people to share more of their personal location information if they choose too. The key however is that the anonymity option would still allow businesses and users to connect without a direct, transparent relationship.

I believe these tweaks would greatly open up the use of location based applications to a broader user base. What do you think?