Sack the CEO!

Does it point to a bankruptcy of management thought when you start looking to the animal""and insect and undersea""world for wisdom? Is this the beginning of the end? Or is it perhaps an indicator of a higher plane of knowledge""an evolved, esoteric one that belongs to the let-noble-thoughts-come-from-all-sides school of thinking?

The cynic in me is convinced it is the former, but I seem to be alone in that view. The blurb on The Starfish and the Spider declares this is a "rare" book and promises it will change the way I understand the world around me. Pierre Omidyar, who founded eBay, declares it to be "compelling and important". Another endorsement on the book's website declares that it "lifts the lid on a revolution in the making, a revolution certain to reshape every organisation on the planet".

That is some praise, but something deep within me still resists believing that fish and mice, and now starfish, can teach me more about management and leadership than any decent B-school program.

Not that the basic premise of The Starfish and the Spider isn't compelling. It is. Essentially, what entrepreneurs Ori Brafman and Rod A Beckstrom suggest in their first book is that open, peer-based organisations are more likely to survive, and indeed thrive, in the current environment than traditional, hierarchical business models. They describe the top-down model as the spider""lots of legs (divisions), but centred on a head (the leader). Cut the head, and the spider dies. Cut a leg, and the spider becomes a seven-legged cripple.

Now, consider the starfish. Again, lots of legs. But""wait for this""no brain. That's right. There's no one in charge""each leg does exactly what it wants to, and the others follow if they feel like it. Cut a starfish's leg, and it will grow a new one. Cut it in half, and you will get two new starfish.

Personally, I believe that if two legs are enough for the most evolved creature on Earth, even four is superfluous to requirement. So the starfish's five and the spider's eight is just showing off. And all this talk of amputation is just gross. But, coming back to Brafman and Beckstrom, they suggest that today's starfish are online networks such as craigslist and eMule, amorphous organisations like Alcoholics Anonymous and al-Qaeda (Who's in charge? Don't know. Who makes the decisions? Everybody. And nobody). It's almost impossible to stop these entities. Even if the authorities manage to stop one P2P music-swapping network, within days (if not hours), a new one will spring up somewhere else. That is how Napster led to Kazaa, which led to eDonkey, which led to eMule.

The book offers a fascinating analogy (as if the whole starfish-spider one weren't enough) to explain how leaderless organisations thrive. In the sixteenth century, Spanish explorer Hernando Cortes killed Montezuma and, in doing so, decimated the ancient Aztec empire. Like Cortes, the Spanish army took just two years to wipe out the Incas after its leader Francisco Pizarro executed Inca leader Atahuallpa. The Spanish forces appeared unbeatable as they continued northward, but that was proved wrong when they met the Apaches in what is now New Mexico. The Apaches trounced them and continued to do so for the next 200 years. The trick? Decentralisation. The Apaches didn't have a chief. Their spiritual leader, the Nant'an, led by example, but there was no compulsion to follow. The Apaches were also spread out, which made it difficult to predict where an attack would come from, or how many would attack. The system, if such a loose structure can be so termed, was not dependent on any individual or a specific location (when the Spaniards burnt their villages, the Apaches became nomads).

Of course, it couldn't last. The Apaches were finally defeated when the (now) Americans found a way to centre them: they gave the Nant'an cattle. The physical form of power created a hierarchy within the society and the Apaches lost their edge.

Spiders mutating into starfish may sound too sci-fi, but it is probably the way forward, say the authors. The lesson for companies is clear: devolve into leaderless structures, distribute knowledge and power across the length of the organisation, opt out of control-and-command hierarchies to more liberal, peer-based setups. Oh, and sack the CEO.

The Starfish and the Spider
The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations

Ori Brafman and Rod A Beckstrom
Penguin Portfolio
Rs 395; 230 pages