The Starfish and the Spider

Before I begin, I have to reiterate that I am not a big fan of business book metaphors; however, there is an interesting new book, The Starfish and the Spider, that attempts to explain “the unstoppable power of leaderless organizations” (I am beginning to hate taglines as well). In the spirit of full disclosure, I have not read said book yet, but I did read a pretty good review in the Boston Globe. The Starfish, with no head, represents the decentralized organization, and the Spider with many legs protruding from its head, is emblematic of the centralized organization. The authors contend that the starfish with no head and replicated organs throughout its body is harder to kill than a spider. The Globe article uses the example of Napster to illustrate the point. Napster was easy to kill because it was an established company with a leader – Kazaa and the other P2P sites that went underground are harder to stop. The authors also use history and current affairs to illustrate their point. The Aztecs were easy to capture, but as the Spanish pushed north they had a harder time with the Apaches. Al Qaeda is a perfect example of a Starfish organization. What do illegal operations and 500 year-old history have do with the modern business and the customer experience. Clearly, we are seeing a major technological and sociological shift in the way that people interact online. The rise of blogging, YouTube, wikis, social networking, etc. is illustrative of the power of the Starfish. I think this theory is complimentary to the long tail. A few weeks ago, we speculated if “the long tail” could be aggregated enough to be profitable. I suspect that the answer with a starfish business model, “yes”; with a spider business model, “no”.