Why You Should Be A Starfish, Not A Spider

A spider will die if you cut off its head, but chop off the arm of a starfish and the creature will grow a new one. Not only that, the severed arm will generate a new body. Starfish can achieve this feat because unlike spiders, they lack a central control mechanism. Instead of a brain, they have a neural network with vital organs replicated across each arm. In business and society, organizations are also structured like either spiders or starfish. While some are traditional and top-down, others are decentralized. Take Alcoholics Anonymous. Want to start an AA circle? Go ahead—anyone can contribute. Conversely, eliminate half its circles and AA will still survive. Social activists have used starfish principles to abolish slavery, win voting rights for women, and fight for animal rights. But until recently, starfish organizations were rare in the business sector. The Internet changed everything. By going online, people no longer had to convene in the same physical location to form a starfish. Anyone in the world can now edit a Wikipedia article, just as anyone can post a Craigslist ad. With only a few paid staffers to its name, Wikipedia is killing off Encyclopaedia Britannica. Similarly, Craigslist is wreaking havoc on newspapers dependent on classified ads. Other starfish, like Kazaa and peer-to-peer music-sharing programs, have hacked away at record-label revenue, cutting it by 25%. Meanwhile, YouTube is shaping up to fundamentally change the entertainment industry. It used to be that the bigger you were, the more power you had. But being small and nimble like starfish gives you flexibility and resilience. Small companies that generate little or no revenue are reshaping huge industries and taking down spider giants in the process. The more spider companies fight starfish networks, the more powerful the starfish become. In suing Napster, for example, the music industry opened a Pandora's box of decentralized programs that are impossible to control. Getting into a fight with a starfish is never the best option. Starfish networks aren't weeds that need plucking. In fact, the starfish's positive qualities of creativity, freedom, and user empowerment can be integrated into traditional organizations. Take eBay's user-rating system, Intuit's wiki TaxAlmanac, or IBM's move to support open-source Linux. In each of these cases, hierarchical companies capitalized on starfish principles by empowering customers and creating an open community. This hybrid approach of maintaining a centralized system while adding starfish features is becoming more and more prevalent. Like the Internet, starfish are here to stay. Their effect on business will be felt for years to come. Ori Brafman Entrepreneur and co-author (with Rod Beckstrom) of The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations (Portfolio Hardcover, 2006)