The Starfish and the Spider
Subtitle “The unstoppable power of leaderless organizations”
This book, by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom, Portfolio 2006 is a highly recommended reading.
In short here are my takes:
It compares organizations being starfish (i.e. decentralized, organic) and those being spider (i.e. centralized, structured) and, o surprise, is very much in favor of the starfish ones (don’t expect anything else from two California Internet kids).
Beside the naiveté, although reasonably balanced here and there, and the over simplicity of concepts, the book presents a number of interesting case studies, all good as analogies, and a number of simple concepts, all actually gaining value because of the naiveté and the over simplicity. As a former strict academic I tend to want perfect rigor and thought through analysis all over the place and, guess what, I think I am the one who is wrong.
On the conceptual side what I found particularly valuable are the notions of center less organization and the replacement of the center by some systemic forces of organization (what I call in my consulting practice’ jargon the “magnetic field” of management). The book illustrates several particularly relevant examples of what it is in practice in several organizations.
What the book misses from my point of view is the dark side of the starfish, the fragility of the body, the risks of disruptive chaos, the value destruction potential, but this is why I said earlier naiveté. Let’s not forget the dark side but let’s not have it paralyze actions.
Similarly it misses the good side of the spider (“Jaime l’araignée et J'aime l’ortie, parce qu’on les hait…” Victor Hugo) since business organizations, if they want to be efficient and effective, need very structured systems and structures. My point is that most business organizations have to be hybrid and that this very characteristic is the diamond to find. Many examples in the book are “nice” starfish but they don’t create a lot of financial or economic value or jobs (although they may create enormous social value or non monetized economic value), they are often even parasites to other value creating organizations (Apache or Linux rely largely on people devoting some of their time free of charge to their development, but we know that often this “free of charge” means actually time diverted from their day job paid by spider organizations.
This comment actually leads me to think that internal social networks (internal to large organizations, my central topic of interest, not the other social networks) could be seen as creating a strange “symbiotic management model” as a few do exist in nature where two plants species or two animal species live on each other and can’t live without each other. I could see the organization of tomorrow being such a model where networks and communities live on the body of the organization and would die if the organization would die, but also conversely the organization needs them to live and grow and would die without them.
Overall a good (and fast) read I really recommend.
(Thanks to Tammy for having presented the book to me, a great gift)
