In 2006, just as the internet was beginning to reshape the economy and the way we work, Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom wrote a best-selling business book. The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations transcended the genre, becoming an international best-seller, the kind of book one finds at an airport kiosk. While its references may be dated more than two decades after its publication, the book’s foundational arguments retain relevance. Moreover, Brafman and Beckstrom’s questions have lost no potency. We often learn through close reading, focused attention and good questions, all of which are readily found in The Starfish and the Spider.
The pair that penned the book came from complementary backgrounds. Brafman is a successful author, a business school lecturer, and a public intellectual. Beckstrom is a tech entrepreneur with a string of important positions in his resume, perhaps most famously as chair of ICANN. That’s the organization responsible for naming conventions on the web.
Driving the book, an exploration of leaderless organization, is a simple analogy. If you cut off the head of a spider, it dies. A starfish, in contrast, has a decentralized neural system. Cut off one of its limbs and it regenerates. Organizations with traditional leadership structures – who is in charge? – are easy to defeat. Leaderless organizations are elusive and difficult to fight. Increasingly, thanks to technology and an ever-changing environment, we need to think about organizational models and their respective strengths and weaknesses.
From that basic observation, the authors look at the ways that the internet disrupted the music business (streaming and file-sharing), the abilities of the Apache nation to withstand colonial capture (in contrast to the Aztec), and the new and changing roles that animate leaderless organizations. The writers examine Bill Wilson and Alcoholics Anonymous. They interview Craig Newmark of the eponymous “Craig’s List.” Wikipedia and Burning Man are additional examples. Leaderless organizations, or perhaps more accurately, leadership movements and/or organizations with highly-distributed leadership, can be powerful. They are not appropriate for all tasks in all organizations, but unless we give them their due, we will miss out on a vitally important structural shift in today’s world.
Historical analysis lead the authors to suggest five principles that shape these organizations. They are grounded in circles, not hierarchical pyramids. A catalyst is needed for their creation and animation, and an ideology binds the participants, which often rest on pre-existing networks. Lastly, they require champions. Interviews and case studies bring these criteria to life, be it a charismatic individual as champion or an out-of-the-box thinker to function as catalyst. Special circumstances are necessary to bring a starfish organization to life.
In addition, Brafman and Beckstrom carve out space for discussion of organizational structures and values. They reference Peter Drucker’s famous study of GM, emphasizing how Toyota learned from the work while GM did not. Even though there is a clear bias in the book towards leaning into leaderless organizations, the authors know that businesses require structures. More discussion of the why and when of those distinctions would have been welcome. The book concludes with observations about upcoming changes, from the power of chaos to the value of values to organizations. The real heart of the work, though, is the basic recognition of when and how leaderless action takes place and why.
The authors draw distinctions between a catalyst and a CEO. The former is a peer who builds trust, relies on intelligence to inspire collaboration. The CEO prefers being a boss who commands and controls, rationally directing the organization through clear power. The catalyst is often behind the scenes. They can hold many different kinds of positions. The CEO, on the other hand, seeks the spotlight and presses for order. The differences are important, for they speak to ways in which change can work its way through a business, organization, or collective.
The analysis holds very interesting consequences for educational organizations and change leadership. Higher education, importantly, demands leadership that spans CEOs and catalysts. Knowing when and how to direct, or not, and how to effect change, is no small task. Add to it that for change to be effective in higher education, shared governance is essential. Few of a college or university’s critical functions are transactional. Instead, they rely on collaboration, interaction, and time. We can no more insure student learning than academia can demand trust from external stakeholders.
Successful academic leadership, in other words, must acknowledge and reflect the intrinsic motivation of employees and participants in the shared enterprise. In that sense, to be effective it must feel like a starfish. In other arenas – think accountability, reporting, and emergency planning – higher education is much more like a spider. Both models are needed and applicable.
The Spider and the Starfish offers a provocative lens through which to consider what does and does not work when it comes to academic leadership.
David Potash