Barnabas File

I n his New Leadership Paradigm model ,   Steve Piersanti challenges organizations to move from the traditional hierarchical structure to an interconnected network.  The former is the pyramid approach that posits ultimate power to a limited number of people at the top who command and control large numbers of people at the bottom of the pyramid.  The alternative is to the network approach that views the organization as a network with leadership and decision-making power disbursed “throughout the many nodes and links of the network.” Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom addressed this idea in their book,  The Starfish and the Spider .   They note, “ If you cut off a spider’s leg, it’s crippled; if you cut off its 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.” The Starfish and the Spider  argues that organizations fall into two categories: traditional “spiders,”...