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,”...

In response to my observation on a blog that leadership in the church is an art rather than a science, my friend Stephen Currie made this comment: “I’m beginning to wonder what ‘leading’ even means for Jesus’ followers. Jesus told us that the Gentile leaders rule by lording over their subjects, but for his followers, this should not be. He who leads will be ‘the slave of all’. There are many of us who feel lost in the church if we are not ‘leading’ in some way. So yeah, I think leading-by-serving is an art. The people who have modeled this best for me were not men and women of learning . . . they just did it for the love of serving as Jesus did.” [1] Stephen makes a good point. For one thing, his comments remind us that “leadership” is more than a role or a title. Every group of human beings will have leadership of some type, but it is conferred in many different ways. Leadership may be assumed, usurped, negotiated, or bestowed, but it is there. Leadership in th...