We're inspired by Rod Beckstrom's superb book, The Starfish and the Spider.
Superficially, starfish look like spiders. A spider is a creature with eight legs coming out of a central body. If you chop off the spider’s head, it dies. It might survive without a leg or two, and probably could even lose a couple of its eight eyes and still function, but it certainly couldn’t survive without its head. The spider has a centralised control system that is similar to most organisations.
A starfish, at first glance, is similar to a spider in appearance. Like the spider, the starfish appears to have legs coming out of a central body. But the starfish is decentralised. It does not have a head. Its central body is not even in charge. In fact, the major organs are replicated throughout each and every leg. If you cut the starfish in half, the animal doesn’t die, it regenerates.
Similar to the starfish, there are a host of emerging organizations that function in a decentralised manner like the starfish. Examples include such entities as Visa, Skype, Craig’s List, Wikipedia, Alcoholics Anonymous and Apache Software, to name a few.
Each time I re-read The Starfish and the Spider I gain new insights, often from seemingly throw-away comments that turn out to have profound implications. If you've not read the book, read the first chapter and buy it!
Explaining their metaphor, the authors note "If you cut off a spider's head, it dies; but if you cut off a starfish's leg, it grows a new one, and that leg can grow into an entirely new starfish. Traditional top-down organizations are like spiders, but now starfish organizations are changing the face of business and the world."