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,”...

Robert Parham died March 5.  I knew Robert for almost three decades.  When we were first introduced, he was a staff member with the Southern Baptist Convention’s Christian Life Commission, one of that denomination’s premiere organizations.  As Parham observed the shifting Baptist landscape, he left the CLC in 1991 to found the Baptist Center for Ethics, and independent voice for ethical concerns.  Both in personal conversations and observing Robert’s leadership over the past 25 years, I learned much about innovation and a positive response to the emerging opportunities in our culture.  When BCE was launched, the organization adopted the pattern set by the CLC--offering conferences, newsletters, and other printed resources that addressed moral and ethical issues.  Parham and his team saw that this strategy was not achieving the desired results.  BCE moved toward curriculum resources, first offering them in a printed form and then...