Networked organisations: the starfish revolution

November 12th, 2009

Samples from Smartmobs and orginated by Michael Leeden

Several thoughtful people have commented on an unusual element in the Iranian revolutionary movement, aka “The Green Path of Hope.” Although there is a troika (Mousavi, Karroubi and Khatami) that inspires many of the movement’s participants, there seems to be a lack of top-down leadership. Indeed, Mousavi has been at pains to say that the people are the true leaders, that he is not creating a political movement but a “social network,” and that the strength of the Green Path derives from the spontaneous and creative actions of millions of Iranians.

It sounds a lot like the thesis put forward in the recent book, The Starfish and the Spider, which argues that top-down organizations are less successful than those that give maximum freedom to their people. If you decapitate a spider, it dies, but if you lop off an arm of a starfish, it regenerates. In like manner, despite a massive crackdown from the Iranian regime–thousands of arrests (now termed “kidnappings” by Iranian Tweeters), scores of executions, mass rape and other forms of torture, show trials and stern intimidation from political and military leaders, judges and clerics, the Green Path moves on, with its next publicly announced challenge to the regime set for December 7th. Meanwhile, demonstrations and strikes continue across the country. . .

Also if you want to get a deeper dive in networked organisations, I suggest taking a stroll over to Euan Semples blog where you can engage in a world of common sense.

In a remarkable book Organisation Theory: a libertarian perspective, Kevin Carson writes

Herbert Simon remarked that, to an observer from Mars, “the dominant feature of the [economic] landscape” would be, not the market, but large organizations. Or as David Friedman put it, “The capitalist system of coordination by trade seems to be largely populated by indigestible lumps of socialism called corporations.” The dominance of that feature, those lumps, is the central theme of Part One: the ways in which the state intervenes in the market to promote the predominance of organizations that are excessively large (i.e., larger than the efficiency considerations of a free market would justify). In the process, it will be helpful to keep in mind questions raised by R.H. Coase seventy years ago:in their analysis of American industrial history, have tended to assume the superior efficiency of large-scale organization, and to accept “economies of scale” as a sufficient explanation for the rise of the large corporation from a supposedly “laissez-faire” economy.

SMLXL archives on organisation

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