The Starfish and The Spider

[AnonyPoni 564]

I read a book a while back for some light reading. It was called "The Starfish and the Spider" and was about centralized and decentralized organizations. It was a good read.

 

This is not so much of a book discussion as it is a starfish/spider one.

 

A spider is your classic, top down organization. The military, government, schools, most companies follow this. There is a person in charge of people who are in charge of people (and so on) and those who do stuff. A starfish is harder to pinpoint. They have no leaders or top down organization. I explained it better in an essay I did on the book...

 

"There are two main types of organizations that the book goes into detail about, “spiders” and “starfish”. The “spiders”, or centralized organizations, are the kind that we see everyday and is easy to comprehend for people. They have someone in charge, people working for him/her, people working for them, and so on. The term “spider” is an analogy, since spiders have a head and legs that are controlled by the head. Spiders are everywhere (no pun intended); they are companies, schools, the government, the military, etc. People almost always assume things are spiders. When you're ripped of by the carnival game guy, you say something like “who the hell is runnin' this show?” When Dave Garrison, the CEO of Netcom, met with French investors in 1995 to talk about investing in his Internet company, they kept asking “Qui est le président de l'Internet?"(Who is the president of the internet?; Dave, who got tired of explaining the internet doesn't have a CEO, eventually claimed he was the president of the internet). When people meet aliens, our first words to them probably will be “Greetings, take me to your leader”. Starfish, on the other hand, are a lot more complicated to understand, even though they are simpler in design. The term “starfish” does a good job at describing a decentralized organization; a starfish has no head. Starfish have a lot of commonalities with their namesake. If an arm of a starfish wants to go somewhere, it literally has to convince the other arms to come with it, and you can't kill it by chopping off it's head (it has none). In fact, in you cut an arm of a starfish (literally), the starfish simply grows another one. In some species, the arm grows into another starfish! What does this have to do with organizations? The book uses dozens of examples to explain this, but I will use the Apache tribe.

The Spanish conquered Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas quickly and almost effortlessly. It was simple: march into the capital, kill the king, and claim that they are the rulers now. As the they went north, they came across the Apaches in what is now modern Southwestern US. Easy, they thought, just another tribe to crush. They defeated the 2,000 year old Aztec civilization, which was very advanced, in almost a year. 200 years after they attacked the primitive Apaches, the Spanish were still fighting them and weren't getting anywhere. How was this possible? It was because the Apaches where like a starfish. They had no cities, kings, or emperors. The Spanish didn't know what to attack. They attack one group, another is just around the corner. There was no orders to follow. If the Spanish cut one group off, they did fine and didn't really notice. The Apache had no chiefs, but they had Nant'ans. A Nant'an is a catalyst, a person that incites the people to fight without actually ordering them to do it. He had no control over what they did, but they would fight just because he was fighting. The Spanish tried to kill all of them, but the people weren't affected and kept fighting anyway. The Spanish eventually gave up.

The Apache were unstoppable not because of weapons or tactics, but because their social structure had no head for the Spanish to cut off. The spread out, no leader, no order situation is basically what a starfish is. It may seem like nothing will get done, but people are willing to do what they need to. Starfish organizations include Alcohol Anonymous, the music sharing sites, and even Al-Queda. That doesn't mean Starfish are bad, they just are a different way of setting up an organization."

 

 

That was probably a TL;DR, but oh well.

 

 

Anyway, what's your take?

[Whiteshade 1,426]

Path of least resistance. Hence, humanity inherently prefers the spider, or centralized system, as they can simply go with the flow.