Leaderless Organizations Make Sense, Read The Starfish and The Spider

Five years ago, some friends of mine decided to start a business at Penn State. Like anything built from scratch, they put their blood, sweat and tears into its creation…it was well worth it. Within a few years, the business became a huge success. Since graduating, they created a main company and licensed the idea to entrepreneurs at 12 schools across the country. Out of respect for their wishes, I'm keeping their names and the name of their business undisclosed.

Last week, I picked up the book, The Starfish and The Spider. As it states on the cover, the book is about, "the unstoppable power of leaderless organizations. The authors describe companies like Napster and Kazaa turning the 100-year-old music industry on its head in just five years. The premise is that, like a starfish, if a decentralized organization loses one of its limbs, it may be temporarily injured, but will not crumble. However, typical top down, hierarchically structured organizations will not survive a blow to their core. Much like a spider will die when its head is cut off. You may be thinking, where is he going with all of this? Let me tell you…

Today's corporate system is set up like the spider. Everything starts at the top and works its way down. Employees have to jump through hoops just to get a new idea in the right hands or to ask for permission to attend a recruiting trip.

I think like a starfish. I was using Napster in middle school and high school, and Kazaa throughout college. "Peer-to-peer" or "starfish networks" are second nature to me. Today, I regularly use technology such as Wikipedia and Facebook which gives me the freedom to create the content I want to see and erase the content I don't. Is it any wonder that the insane bureaucracy that the corporate world thrives on is incredibly difficult for me to adapt to? Is it any wonder that nearly all of my friends plan to start their own businesses so they can create their own content?

My buddies innately understood our generations need to create their own content. Long before this book was even published, they knew that rather than creating a huge corporation with employees who report every detail to headquarters, they were better off licensing the idea to motivated students. All they had to say was, "Do you want to run your own business?" As you can imagine, very few students turned that proposition down.

If my friends had gone the other route and tried to recruit these students as employees in charge of running a business and receiving monthly paychecks, I guarantee they would not be nearly as successful as they are today. To this day, they refuse to call themselves the boss or call their licensees employees. Maybe they used this strategy to play into the well known fact that many millennials want to run their own business. But I think it has more to do with the fact that in today's world, a decentralized or leaderless organization makes a lot more sense then an antiquated hierarchically structured one. There is still a headquarters, and my friends are definitely the "CEO's," they just aren't hung up on power or control. Success is all that matters.

As our generation enters the workforce, strict, top-down corporations will face a huge problem trying to retain millennial talent. Companies will eventually have to adapt and change their fundamental structure from one of command and control to one of communication, trust and knowledge sharing. Take a tip from my friends and trust your millennial talent to run, or at least play an active role in their projects. In return you will receive great work and dedicated employees. Who knows, you may even keep your top talent from running to Google after a year or two.