The Starfish and the Spider
Currently I am reading “The Starfish and the Spider, the Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations” by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom. It’s a really interesting book on how people can organize themselves as a group without a traditional leadership hierarchy. The authors compare such organizations with starfish. When you cut a starfish’s legs off, the leg will grow into a new starfish. When you cut off a spider’s head it will die.
In a starfish organization everyone has equal powers and there is no leader. At first one might think that this will cause anarchy, but a starfish organization has a couple of characteristics that prevent this. Out of the chaos, creativity will arise and the organization will be very resilliant to change.
Some famous examples of starfish organizations in the book are the Apache indians, the AA (Anonymous Alcoholics) organization, Wikipidia, Napster and Kazaa. Open source development projects tend to be organised as starfish too.
