The Starfish and the Spider

This sounds like a great book:

I have just finished reading a marvelous book, The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom. (Full disclosure: Ori Brafman endorsed my new book Group Genius.) SS (I’ll call it by the title’s initials) is, at root, a book about complex social networks, and the principles and stories in it will be immediately recognizable to scholars who study social networks, complex dynamical systems, and social emergence. But what’s brilliant about this book is that it’s so accessible; not a single academic citation, not even in the notes. Instead, their point is made with fascinating stories, and they make concrete recommendations that managers will easily be able to apply to their own organizations.

The book’s unifying thread is the distinction between two kinds of organizational forms. A spider is a centralized organization, the hierarchical company of the 1950s. If you cut off a spider’s head, it dies. The starfish is a decentralized organization, what scholars would call self-organizing, self-managing, or emergent (although these terms don’t appear in the book). A starfish doesn’t have a head. If you cut off one leg, the starfish grows a new one; and the detached leg can actually grow itself another four legs. I knew that; but what I didn’t know was that a starfish has no central nervous system. As Brafman and Beckstrom report, neuroscientists have discovered that what happens when a starfish starts walking is that the urge to walk begins in one of the five legs, and then somehow the other four legs are convinced to join in (scientists don’t yet know how this happens).

This makes the starfish an apt metaphor for leaderless, self-managed organizations. Their examples include Al Qaeda, Wikipedia, the Apache’s resistance to the Spanish colonists, Alcoholics Anonymous, and how the abolitionist movement piggybacked on the Quaker community’s decentralized organization. Of course, the Internet is frequently mentioned–not only as a starfish itself, but as a mechanism that makes the formation of starfish much more easy than it was in the past. These are familiar stories, but SS does a wonderful job of identifying the common themes and translating them into practical advice.

Read the whole thing.