The Starfish and The Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations
The Starfish and The Spider
by Ori Brafman and
Rod A. Beckstrom
Review by Jennifer Dawson
What do Napster, Alcoholics Anonymous, Wikipedia, the Apaches, Skype, the abolitionist movement in Britain, the Animal Liberation Front, and al Qaeda all have in common? According to Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom, authors of The Starfish and The Spider, they are all examples of “starfish” organizations: open, decentralized systems that achieve globe-changing outcomes, all without a front-and-centre call-the-shots leader. A starfish doesn’t have a head. Cut off its leg and it grows another. And sometimes a second starfish grows from the severed limb. This is in stark contrast to the “spider” organization: a coercive, closed, top-down system that dies when its (figurative) head is chopped off.
Brafman and Beckstrom propose that, with the advent of the Internet, starfish organizations have incredible capacity to engage individuals on a planet-wide scale, sometimes at a great cost to large, multinational spider companies. They propose a vision for a new, “hybrid” organization that blends the democratic, decentralized, community-minded spirit of the starfish organization with the structure, control and profitability of a spider.
