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March 19, 2008

Leaderless Organisations

Nice bit of point-scoring at PMQ’s when David Cameron revealed the favourite book of David Muir, new Number 10 strategist, is: “The Unstoppable Power Of Leaderless Organisations”.

The full name of the book appears to be

The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations (Hardcover)  

By the sound of it, the book’s lessons seem hard to reconcile with Gordon Brown’s “Stalinist” tendencies to control everything himself.

Here is the review by Amazon.co.uk.

His work provides an understanding of the amazing force that links some of today’s most successful companies. If you cut off a spider’s leg, it’s crippled; if you cut off it’s head, it dies. But if you cut off a starfish’s leg it grows a new one, and the old leg can grow into an entirely new starfish.

“Some organisations are just as decentralised as starfish, with no control centre or grand strategy. Think of craigslist and the original Napster, run totally by their own customers. Or Alcoholics Anonymous, which has thrived for decades as a loose network of small groups. Or even al Qaeda, which is so hard to destroy because its cells function independently.

“The Starfish and the Spider”, based on groundbreaking research into decentralised organisations, proves that this type of leadership is primed to change the world. Major companies like eBay, IBM, Sun, and GE are starting to decentralise, with great results. Decentralisation isn’t easy for people who are used to the classic chain of commence organisation. But as readers will learn through this book’s fascinating stories - ranging from the music business to geopolitics - it can be a very dangerous trend to ignore.

4 Responses to “Leaderless Organisations”

Comments

  1. This post looks familiar!

    Posted by: Samuel Coates | March 20th, 2008 at 9:54 am | Report this comment
  2. Yes, I see that someone called Samuel Coates wrote it on the CentreRight blog…..20 minutes after me.

    Maybe we both have access to Google.

    Jim

    Posted by: Jim Pickard | March 20th, 2008 at 10:40 am | Report this comment
  3. My apologies in that case. The resemblance in how we wrote it up is uncanny. You really should get time stamps on your posts…

    Posted by: Samuel Coates | March 20th, 2008 at 11:53 am | Report this comment
  4. I wonder if our UK health and social care scene could be described as an “officially leaderless” organisation? Remember back in March 2005 John Reid introduced us to “Creating a patient-led NHS” and then a couple of months later do I remember our (then) P.M confirming that his role no longer contained it’s official leadership?

    Posted by: Mrs.Josephine Hyde-Hartley | March 25th, 2008 at 11:00 pm | Report this comment

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