Call It Group Theory

A remarkably narrated story of how leaderless organizations can prosper and succeed

Book titles are meant to be deceptively desirable. They are meant to entice and snare, lure you into reading the book. The title is often the thing that alerts your book-neurons in your brain and thus prompts immediate purchase. But then would a book that travels from your brain to the journeys that many corporations make in their hierarchical definition be as interesting as you would imagine? Especially when it tells you no one neuron can help you remember your grandma: they are a bunch of cells that do the trick, almost a grandma cell! Hence even the brain has not just one leader neuron, but many who group together.

The answer is a vociferous yes if it comes to the splendid The Starfish and the Spider. Brafman and Rod have, with remarkable felicity, argued a case for organisations that are leaderless as opposed to the common management travesty of labeling an organisation democratic. Their belief is anchored in several examples that abound in management history of people and organisations that created revenues and impact without a structure, which would have guaranteed the much touted governance issues.

Much like the starfish which looks disarmingly similar to the spider, yet every arm of the starfish is the control system in itself apart from being regenerative: each arm has to choose to travel before the whole starfish moves unlike the spider where there is a control mechanism!

Take, for instance, when Shawn Fanning founded Napster, which enabled you to share music files. Taking on music companies, from MGM to Sony, Napster had no leader or ruler 8212; just a shared belief and that was that music you liked was music you could own. It8217;s another matter the US Supreme Court shut it down.

The authors believe that this kind of leaderless world is not just the preserve of corporations but even had its genesis in tribal behaviour. The Apaches, for instance, were without one single control system and it is this decentralisation system that gets a lot of lip but very little service.

The Internet is mentioned as yet another example of a leaderless world and the analogy that the authors give is interesting. Dave Garrison was hired as the CEO of Netcom in 1995 and his task was to raise funds. For the second round of funding he winged his way to Paris where he met a group of French investors who initially believed they had a mad American amidst them: their concern was not the technology but whether the Internet had a president. Dave had two choices: to keep them confused and irate or to declare himself the world8217;s first president of the Internet, which he did, and subsequently got the much-needed funding for the Internet.

There is a great deal of merit to a book such as this in these times. With more and more people becoming entrepreneurs even when they are employees, when we look increasingly at technology to collapse borders and geographies, it is values and beliefs that drive businesses and within that levels of motivation and inspiration. People are becoming increasingly intolerant of being told what to do; empowerment has been replaced with the power to execute and this power can only be harnessed if people working in the corporation actually exercise independence both of the mind and the function. In fact the authors believe that most decentralized organisations prepare themselves for competitive attack by becoming even more open and freer if that is possible. The hallmark of a decentralized organisation is , there is no such thing as central intelligence: intelligence is spread and shared so that the maximum people can benefit from it and come up with creatively robust solutions.

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In sum, this is an unputdownable book, not another sequel to managing corporations but a remarkably well-told tale of the future with so many examples in history to tell us that leaderless corporations do succeed .