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1-Page Summary of The Starfish and the Spider
Introduction
A starfish and a spider look similar, but if you attack them in the same way, you’ll get different results. You can kill a spider by cutting off its head. However, if you cut a starfish in half, it will just regenerate into two separate creatures because they’re decentralized neural networks.
Decentralized organizations are difficult to defeat or compete with because they have no hierarchy and everyone is able to contribute. As a result, if you try to break up the organization, it will only get stronger.
Keep in mind that decentralized organizations are effective because they’re smaller and have low costs. They also succeed when members contribute to the organization, and the best ideas come from the fringes of an organization’s network. If you attack a decentralized organization, it becomes stronger than ever before. You can manage these organizations by measuring their connections between people, becoming a catalyst for change within them or joining them yourself if you can’t beat them at all.
MGM’s Mistake and the Apache Mystery
When you attack an organization that is decentralized, it becomes more decentralized. For example:
Music pirates were a problem in the mid-aughts. The music industry sued Grokster, a peer-to-peer network that people used to pirate music. They also sued individual users who had pirated music, but as they kept suing the problem of piracy kept getting worse. It was like fighting a hydra.
Like the Apache tribe, music pirates are difficult to beat. The Spanish conquistadors had defeated the Aztecs and Incas by killing their leaders. However, they couldn’t do that with the Apaches because of their small groups and spiritual leaders who could easily be replaced. When one group was killed, the rest of them survived and raided the Spanish.
Organizations can be classified as centralized or decentralized. Centralized organizations have a hierarchy of leaders with defined roles and responsibilities, whereas decentralized ones have no such hierarchy; instead, they’re based on the ideas of equal members (leaders). These groups tend to be more efficient because rules are enforced for every member.
The Spider, the Starfish, and the President of the Internet
Decentralized organizations are like starfish. If you cut off a leg, the organism can regrow it. It has to convince all of its other legs to move with it if one wants to go somewhere else on its own. Cutting an organization in half will result in two separate entities, each with their own set of problems and goals.
From a distance, it’s easy to mistake a starfish for a spider. They both have many legs and move around on the ground. But if you cut off one of its legs, the leg grows back. If you cut off its head, however (executive management), it dies.
In decentralized organizations, people are allowed to be creative and come up with their own ideas. For example, Alcoholics Anonymous was founded by Bill Watson, but as the program grew in popularity, it became less centralized and now there are many different groups that choose how they run themselves (and do a good job at it).
AA is also a good example of how decentralized organizations can adapt to a changing environment. When the founders wanted Narcotics Anonymous and Al-Anon, they were able to take AA’s 12-step program and make it fit their needs. It was easy for them to do that because the organization is run by its members, allowing it to grow quickly with little outside intervention.
Organizations can be decentralized or centralized. In a decentralized organization, there is no one person in charge. Therefore, removing the leader won’t disband it because there’s no clear leadership structure. There are no specific headquarters and everyone is free to contribute as they see fit. If you remove one group from a decentralized organization, the rest of the group will take over for that missing group since power and knowledge are distributed throughout rather than concentrated in just a few people. The organization is flexible and adaptable to changes since there’s not really any way to tell how many people belong to it or what roles each person plays within it (which makes it difficult if you want to identify those who have more control). Finally, communication among groups within this type of organizational structure happens directly between them rather than through some sort of hierarchy which means information flows freely without being filtered by someone else first before reaching other members of the organization.
