The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations - I Love Marketing Episode #229

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish and this is the I love marketing podcast. Hello, this is Joe Polish, president of Piranha Marketing and founder of the Genius Network interview series. And today I am going to interview a guy by the name of Rod Beckstrom. And Rod, can you hear me okay?

I sure can.

Where are you located right now? I know you're in a hotel somewhere.

I'm in a hotel in Portland, Oregon. Just came up here for the open source convention speaking tonight. Wonderful. Okay, good.

Well I'm thinking, man, if you're speaking tonight, this is going to be interesting. You're a pretty hard working guy. All right, well let me do this.

This will be the only portion of.

The interview that I actually read anything because I'm going to unless I decide to pick up your book and read something out of it. But nonetheless, I want to give the listeners an idea of who is Rod Beckstrom. You are an author, a speaker and you're chairman and chief catalyst of a new software company called tweaky.net. you founded Cats Software Inc. Which you took public as CEO. Rod also serves on the boards of Environmental Defense and Jamie Bora Africa limited He's also on the board of the Pacific Council of Foreign Relationships and on the board of kiva.org Rod holds a BA and an MBA from Stanford and was a Fulbright Scholar. He lives in Palo Alto, California. And I believe you have two children.

That's right.

The reason that I'm interviewing Rod today is for one, he wrote a fascinating book. And when I say fascinating, I mean really, really fascinating and an important book. He's the co author of the Starfish and the the Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations that presents a new model for analyzing organizations leadership style and competitive strategies. Well, Rod, first off, thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview with me. I've been looking really forward to doing it this really the first time that we've ever met over the phone. And I'm really looking forward to asking you some questions. You've done a lot of stuff. I've gone through your website, I've read a lot about you. I've watched videos of you on television and you've been featured in movies and all kinds of stuff. So if you could maybe give the thumbnail sketch of who you are covering anything that of course I didn't cover in that brief introduction of you just so our listeners have an idea of who you are and then I'll get in to ask you some questions about this Fascinating book that you wrote.

Sure. Well, thank you so much, Joe. It's an honor and a pleasure to be here with you and with all your listeners today. I think you covered the high points in my background. We're all very multifaceted, so we have a lot of different interests and passions. A few of the other things I've been involved in that were not at resumes. I dedicated three and a half years of my life to working for peace following 911 when I was in New York that day watching the towers burn. And that work for peace took me all over the Middle east for about three and a half years. Contributed to the insights that Ori and I share in the book. So that's kind of another piece and that's really about it.

Gotcha.

Gotcha.

Well, there's so much more, but I know you don't want to brag about yourself. So what I will just say is that everyone, when you. I'm going to ask Rod some questions about this book, the Spiders and the Starfish. I highly recommend you go and get the book immediately though. And I think after you listen to what we talk about today, you'll see this enormous insight. So, Rod, first off, the title of your book, the Starfish and the Spider, and I'll maybe say the Spider and the Starfish and confuse it, but the actual title is the Starfish and the Spider. What is the difference between a starfish and a spider? Just in general. And then we'll go from there.

Sure, it's a great question. Because the starfish and the spider as two creatures, they look superficially similar if we just look at them from above. They both have a lot of arms or legs, but if we look at their internal biology or their internal physiology, they are completely dissimilar. They're organized completely differently. And by looking at that, we can develop a new understanding of human organizations or organisms. So let's look at the spider first. Spider has a body in the middle, four legs on each side and a head on top. And if we cut off the leg of an adult spider, we just get a crippled seven legged spider. It can still run around, but if we cut its head off, it dies. And the reason it dies is because it is a centralized organism and it has to have the brain, which is the head of its central nervous system to survive. And when we've looked at organizations in the west over the last couple hundred years, we have really looked at spider organizations. We've always assumed there's a boss on top, that there's a CEO Or a president or a director, or the owner of the business, and that everything below that person is very well structured, whether it's a functional organization or a geographic based organization or a matrix organization. We've been doing all these org charts of spider organizations, but there's a new proliferation in the world of organizations that are a lot more like the starfish. So if we look at the starfish, starfish have between four and 50 arms. Actually, usually they have five. For those that have lived near the ocean, you probably know that if you cut one arm off a starfish, it can actually regrow that arm back to full length. What very few people know, and we discovered in our research, is that in some species of starfish, if you cut off all five arms, each arm can miraculously regenerate an entire new starfish. So you can actually cut a starfish into five pieces and get five new starfish. Now why can a starfish do that? It can do that because it is completely decentralized as an organism. In other words, it does not have any essential central organs. Every one of the organs that it needs to live and survive is replicated in every one of the arms. The spider represents centralized organizations, and the starfish represents highly decentralized organizations like al Qaeda or like the Wikipedia community, or like highly franchise oriented businesses that tend towards the starfish side of the scale. So it's a new framework for looking at organizations because every organization lives in a continuum between being a spider at one extreme or being a starfish, and very decentralized at the other extreme. So that's where the title came from.

Got you. Well, I mean, just the whole process of it. How many different species of starfish are there? I mean, this is not a business question, but actual starfish? I mean, how many different species are there?

Yeah, I'm actually not sure. I want to say 60 something. But then there's huge variation in coloration even within those species. So like on the COVID of our book, we have the blue lingchia, but there's red ling kea, yellow and other colors. And I think they're actually the same species. So there's really thousands and thousands of different looking starfish around the world. And they have, by the way, survived for hundreds of millions of years. So they're a very successful creature in terms of surviving over an incredibly long period of time.

I think it's a fascinating way to actually look at the way that new businesses and organizations are actually made up. Can you give some other examples of current day or in recent years, starfish organizations that have really just taken hold. So much of this is Internet based.

Sure, if you look at most of the real Internet phenomenon companies, they really do leverage starfish principles. Right now, two of the darlings would probably be MySpace and Facebook, where so many people, particularly young people, are spending a lot of hours every week basically marketing themselves, sharing themselves and socially networking with one another. And the secret to the success of those sites is that they are very starfish like they are very open. So anyone can participate, and anyone who participates is on the same level. And to get a stronger network, you have to kind of self market or build that network. But it's a level playing field because. Because whether you are growing up in a slum in Nairobi, Africa, if you've got access to a computer, you can set up a MySpace page, or whether you're a child of privilege living in Connecticut or New Jersey. So the Internet itself is a starfish network because it has no headquarters. And then these new social environments, MySpace, Facebook, even Craigslist and ebay are open systems where anyone can come and participate and in most cases participate for free. So the starfish principle and these networks that leverage these ideas are really gaining tremendous power and value in society.

And the starfish could be, of course, like any business, it could be good, it could be bad. You mentioned in your book, you talk about Al Qaeda as a starfish organization. You talk about AA as a starfish organization. Wikipedia, one thing, let's take Wikipedia as an example. I imagine right now there's thousands of people, maybe tens of thousands, creating content, getting paid for it on this site called Wikipedia. I mean, what is that all about? How does that actually start?

It's a great story. You look at Wikipedia and it started off as Nupedia. And Nupedia had a spider model. The Nupedia spider model was they were only going to hire experts in like 60 different fields. And these were going to be professors and tenure and peer reviewed people and they were going to peer reviewed articles. And after like a year and a half, nothing had happened. They had like a tiny handful of articles, it wasn't moving. And the lead developer said, hey, you know, there's this new thing out called wikis that Ward Cunningham invented in about 1995. And Ward was a famous programmer in object oriented systems that are also very starfish like. But the wiki was designed to be the easiest to use possible database on the Internet. So Wikipedia picked up a wiki and then they said, let's change for a while. Only for an experiment, let's let anybody who wants to contribute articles and edit articles. But then once we start getting this together, we'll lock it down and we'll edit and have control. Well, once they opened it up and shared it with the world, it just started going like crazy. So people started contributing and different people have different roles in the community. Some people like to create new articles, some people like to contribute to existing articles. Some people like to edit text, some people like to copy edit. Some people like to come in and add graphics. Other people are janitors and clean up garbage off the site. Other people are part of the vigilantes to stop the vandalism and bad words and things coming in. So this whole sociological phenomenon happened once they opened it up. And I was on Wikipedia today and I noticed that there's almost 1.9 million articles just in English in Wikipedia now. And I think it's spread to 100 different languages. So they open it up. They did have some people working on creating some of that content in the beginning. So it takes some people coming together to do something. It's a little bit similar with Twikey. The product that I'm involved in working with now started back in 1998 as a tool for businesses, so a wiki, especially for running businesses. And one guy built it, Peter Tunney, the founder of Twiki, because the company he was working for was shutting down the California office he was part of and they didn't want him to move, but they changed management and they said, start working on customer support and build a knowledge base. And he thought that the old knowledge bases were too shut and hard to use. So he built a wiki to do it on. And now it's evolved to. There's literally like 4 million users around the world, most of them in business, using Twikey to actually run business operations. It's quite fascinating.

It's very fascinating. So looking at centralized and decentralized organizations, you use those terms. Can you think of any examples of, say, like a spider centralized organizations that are in the process of becoming a starfish or a decentralized organization?

Sure, sure. One good example is the United States military establishment. And I have a lot of respect for the military. The US Military is one of the best training and management development systems in the world and really transformed since they adopted total quality management principles back in the 1980s. So the military is an incredibly complex machine, but it's largely been spider like or top down and hierarchy based. And yet now they're fighting an enemy that is completely decentralized. I mean, you don't know where these terrorists are. They're never going to fight you with tanks on a battlefront or battle line. They're living inside communities and moving around and organizing and acting. And that puts an enormous strain or challenge on the traditional models. And to give you an idea of how the military is moving, there's a manual in the military called the Counter Operations Manual or it's called COIN for Counterinsurgency. And they just came out with a new version. The new version really is very, very consistent with the Starfish principles and the principles we laid out in the book the Starfish and the Spider and the guy who's been promoted to run the war in Iraq, General David Petraeus was a co author of that new counterinsurgency manual. And it really talks about how war is becoming more of a sociological phenomenon and how you have to win the hearts and minds of communities and countries to deal with them. So the US military is now trying to restructure itself completely and move towards more different and open principles, including for example, using wikis on the battlefield. There's a new wiki system which was built by captains in the battle zone of Iraq who wanted to share intelligence on towns and villages and communities that simply were not being captured and shared through the traditional top down or hierarchical intelligence structures. So companycommand.com is the website. It's private only to the military, but it's based on wiki tools and wiki principles. So you're seeing the military have to reinvent itself. We're seeing the same thing with big business. Look at went out of business because it was so centralized or didn't quite go out of business but sold out to SBC which then renamed AT&T because of the challenges in competing in long distance phone calls with little starfish companies like Skype or Pioneer Telephone or Everdial, all the small players that could use the decentralized network, the Internet to deliver what are called voip calls or voice over IP Voice over Internet protocol. So the Starfish trend is affecting huge players in telecommunications, huge players in military and foreign policy. It's really the trend is hitting almost every industry.

Well, I mean I believe your book is not just about business, it's about just. It's fascinating how many applications and insights that I believe anyone will get from reading it to our small business owners that would be listening to us right now have this conversation that may not yet be able to wrap their head around this. How does this sort of stuff apply to a small business owner?

In a lot of different ways One way is the mere fact that the Internet exists. So many small businesses now are doing a great job of staying in email contact with their customers and emailing marketing campaigns or special offers or coupons. But you can do that now on a very targeted basis and it only takes the cost of what you create for your communication programs. Obviously delivering the emails is virtually free. Same thing with websites. So many small businesses now. And I'd heard recently about a restaurant in community that actually was in, I think it was up in Rockport, Maine, how this restaurant decided to just do a really good blog on what was going on in the community and what shows were in town or what was happening here or there. Kind of a more personalized Craigslist thing. And business boomed for the restaurant because it developed a personality and it communicated with the community and with its customers. So blogging is a tool that's available to any business now if they want to use it. Email has been overused in many cases inside of companies. And one of the big opportunities for businesses is to move towards using wikis, Twiki and other products for collaboration inside the company. Because let's say you are trying to manage a project like you are building a bridge or you are building a restaurant or any project you are doing. If you copy everyone in emails and if everyone is making comments on spreadsheets or on word documents through emails, then they are not all getting synthesized together and pulling it back together is a separate act. Using wikis and collaboration tools. Email traffic tends to start dropping 70% on projects. The great news is wikis are free. They are free technology. You've got to pay for them if you want to have support and training. But there's great wikis that are free tools that small businesses can use to basically run more efficiently to organize their operations. So it's on the customer side, how do you communicate through emails and blogs or even through your own wikis or your Internet sites that you issue. And then internally in operations, how you can leverage this technology. And then it's also the question of the management philosophy, just being aware that you and running a small business, do you want to be the dictator and do you want to be Mr. Or Mrs. Micromanager and everything? Then that's very spider like because you're not trusting other people to make decisions? Or are you really going to train your staff and empower them with more responsibility, allow them to make some mistakes, but develop responsibility for running more of your business? And that's much more starfish like. So when you read the book The Starfish and spider. There's a whole chapter on your leadership style and do you want to be a spider basically, or do you want to be more like a starfish? Or where do you want to be in the middle? Every decision you make as a business owner or manager is moving you in one direction or the other. And our hope is to help make people more aware of the impact of those decisions that we make as business owners and managers.

That's why I think it is such an important book because it has certainly caused me to think about things in ways that I never would have. Which, by the way, I want to give credit for where I actually first found out about your book. I was first introduced to your book by Dan Sullivan, who is the founder of a really amazing company called Strategic Coach. They coach some of the top entrepreneur leaders in the world. And then Ellen Maidman Tanner over at Pinnacle Care International was the one that helped to allow me to get through you and arrange an interview with you. And so both those people, I want to give them credit where credit is due for helping with this because they also are spreading the message in a lot of ways. And what I want to kind of ask you just for my own clarification on better understanding the difference between a starfish organization and a spider or where they kind of intermix. Let's take Apple Computers for example. I think you've done some work with Steve Jobs in the past.

Yes, I have. Okay.

Now when Apple was going through its period of time where they were not doing so well, but they were surviving as a result of just the people that were such Apple fanatics and fans, they have a die hard group of people that just love Apple, would that be considered a starfish or parts of it? Although.

Because.

Because when Steve Jobs is now CEO or whatever position he calls himself when he was not there and there was other management, how do you look at that organization and especially their current massive growth?

Yeah, it's a really great question because they're a bit of a conundrum because in a world where mostly starfish organizations are having success, Apple is actually quite a spider. Spider in some ways. The part of them that Starfish like is what you said. The user community, the fact that people love Apple products and love the fact that they brought the graphical user interface to the public. But as a leader, Steve Jobs is one of the great spiders. I mean, Apple is a top down organization where he really is the lead creative genius in pushing that ship forward. And Steve has just got an unparalleled ability to look at a marketplace and look where technologies are moving and to come up with these just incredible high quality consumer products like the one I'm sitting in front of my MacBook Pro right now, which is, I think in all the ratings, is usually rated as the best PC in the world, the best laptop in terms of overall satisfaction. Or you look at the iPhone that just came out, it's a beautiful device. So Steve is a genius, but he really is a spider. He knows where he wants to go. He has a lot of very smart people around him that he listens to, but he really sets the strategic direction of that company point blank. It works because he is so brilliant and he is so creative and he knows how to do the marketing and the branding as well as the amazing technology and product development. So Apple is an anomaly. And to show how critical Steve is, just look what happened to Apple when he left. When he left Apple, it completely stagnated. Even though those same high quality people were there. The day he left, the next day he left, 99.9% of the people were still at Apple. But his presence as a leader and very spider like was very productive for the organization because they lost that and they lost their way. They just couldn't innovate anymore and they tried to do the Newton and they did different things that didn't really work in the market. So Steve's an anomaly in a world where mostly starfish strategies are working. Let me contrast it with Google for a second. You look at Google and a couple things come true. And I've discussed this briefly with both Larry Page and Sergey Brin. I was with Larry at the TED conference a couple years ago and I remarked to him that it seemed to me the great success of Google was the decentralization of page ranking, etc. He goes, no, no, it's very centralized. We do it all on our servers. They said, yes, yes, you do. But your algorithms leverage all the intelligence of all of us who use the Internet. Because your algorithms watch where we click. Your algorithms watch how pages and web links point to each other. So the algorithms are centralized, but they're scanning and literally crawling around the web, looking at all the interrelationships and saying, you know what? We're going to use those interrelationships and those traffic levels will drive the page ranks if we serve up eight results. When you search for something like Joe Polish, then the Joe Polish link that you click on will increase the rating on that. So it's all really driven by the network. Whereas Yahoo had editors, so they had editors in each vertical area, like golf or sports, who would go and look for the best pages and say, here's the best pages for you. So Google put the power out to everyone on the Internet, whereas Yahoo was initially using editors internally. And so that difference in strategy led to their success. And then if you look at where Google is going in the future, they were interviewed recently and asked, what's the future of Google? Where are you going to be in five years? And they said, we don't know. We'll be wherever our employees and their innovation takes us. Now that would sound like a very cute quote, but it's not a cute quote because Google allows their engineers to take one day a week to work on any skunk work projects they want, any crazy new idea they have for a product or service they can work on. And that's where Gmail has come from. That's where so many different. The SMS search service. Most people don't know this. You can dial a number on Google and your SMS, I think it's 4457-there's a number and you dial that number and I could say Joe Polish in a city, Arizona or something, it will come up with your address and phone number just by sending an sms.

Wow, interesting.

So Google has really used starfish models to develop new innovations with inside the company, whereas Apple's been top down. Coming from Steve.

Well, thank you for explaining that. I mean that's exactly what I was looking for and just trying to wrap my head around it. And also I would say that when Steve Jobs left for that period of time, it was the starfish that, that most likely I would think kept the company alive in position for him to come back as a spider. But had not it been for, I think the starfish qualities of the client base and the fans, that probably never would have happened. Would that be an accurate.

Absolutely. And as a spider, he knows how to charismatically attract the starfish to his platform. So yeah, you're absolutely right. And so actually his organization is a hybrid and we talk about that in the book. Everything is not either a starfish or a spider. Most organizations are hybrids and they exist somewhere in the world and they're a fascinating hybrid with such great starfish users on the bottom and such a commanding spider on the top.

You were interviewed by Deepak Chopra and I heard that interview and you were talking about some of the management methodologies, I guess I would refer to it as at Google that that basically forced or somehow created innovation by the amount of, I guess, workload or stuff that they put on the managers that they hire. Can you speak to that a little bit? Because I thought it was very interesting.

Yeah. Google has a management philosophy which is that they do not want to be over managed, but rather they want to be under managed. Now what does that mean, to be under managed? What it means is they always want to give managers more responsibility to do more than they could ever possibly handle. Why? Because in the system appears like it may be near a breaking point, but in fact it's much more organic and agile. Because if an organization is over managed and the managers have such a firm grasp on the business and how they're trying to run it, innovation often dies. And so they literally believe in pouring more onto the managers than they can possibly handle, just so the superstars among their employees that report to the manager can come up with new innovations and new solutions. And it just keeps the organization fluid. And some of this is reflected in a good book called Competing on the Edge that was written by Shona Brown when she was a consultant at McKinsey and she's now the SVP of operations at Google. Is she the one that wrote the Support Economy? I'm not sure. I'm not sure. But she wrote Competing on the Edge, she co authored that book. And Competing on the Edge talks about chaos and how now you've got to keep your organization in somewhat of a chaotic state for it to be constantly evolving and adapting to its environment. Once things get too well structured, too well planned, too well under control, innovation and responsiveness and even the morale of the employees will often suffer. Which is kind of a crazy idea. But it's very starfish like.

Yeah, well, it absolutely is. I mean, I had a really brilliant guy that I learned a lot about marketing from. He used to have a saying that he used to tell me, which I believe in. I've seen it demonstrated in many of my very wealthy, very innovative and very crazy clients and associates and acquaintances that I've met over the years, which is the world advances on the backs of its neurotics. There's a fine line between crazy thinkers and insanity and all kinds of stuff, but boy, does some interesting innovation come out of it. I was watching a segment in a movie that you were were featured in, which I believe is what is you address the Commonwealth Club and there was a question that was asked of you. What do you do when people tell you that you're crazy? And I like to ask you basically the same question. I mean, you're pretty much a breakthrough kind of thinker. And I believe that in order to have a breakthrough, sometimes, if not all the time, you've got to break something. So, so what's your response to that? Someone says, you know, Rod, what the heck are you talking about? Or look at what this person is doing over here. I mean, how would you respond to that sort of comment?

I'd respond is I think we're crazy if we worry about other people's opinions and judgments of us. You know, that's true craziness. To be sane is to be true to your own soul, to be true to our own souls, and to know and believe in what we're doing here. But if we get caught up in the judgments of others and others saying, you're crazy. People thought we were crazy when we were trying to build a peace organization. And we said, we're going to model this on Al Qaeda. And people said, you are crazy. And we said, no, why is that crazy? Al Qaeda is working, it's tragically working very negatively. Why don't we take the way they organize and use it for good? And that's what we did, and that's how we cracked the code on decentralized human networks was by studying Al Qaeda. Wow, that's fascinating because tragically, they really developed an advanced understanding of it and then we abstracted from it. So like there's a manual, so many people talk about Al Qaeda, not many people have stopped and read the Al Qaeda training manual. And there's a 180 page manual out there. It's been found in two different apartments. The different versions are almost the same and it spells out how they recruit members, how they organize, how they self fund. And it is a manifesto for building a decentralized terror network for any group that would ever want to do that. But studying that document and then trying to understand and replicate it for good, which we did, so we were told we were crazy. But in fact being crazy led us to explore an idea that has now shed light on so many phenomena in the Internet, whether it's Google or MySpace and you know, basically develop a whole new, it's a whole new organization theory that all organizations exist on this continuum between centralized and decentralized, or between the spider and the starfish. It's a very comprehensive, simple new management theory. And it came out of that. So yeah, I think we're crazy if we listen to other people's opinions. We just have to be true to ourselves.

I couldn't agree with you more. And I have a client by the name of Bill Phillips. He wrote the book Body for Life. And in a lot of ways, he created a starfish sort of movement with his physique transformation contest that he started years ago that even to this day there's still tens of thousands of people that are involved in it. And he has not come out with a book in a long time, although his new book is coming out very soon.

Soon.

He made a comment to me that I don't know if he originally came up with it or has heard it somewhere, but he says when they hijacked the planes, 9, 11, they didn't really just hijack airplanes, they hijacked the American media.

Oh, absolutely, yeah.

So with all of your study, and this is, I didn't think I'd be asking you this question, but it just comes to mind with your study of Al Qaeda. Do you also learn what is their motivation? What is their intention? Is it throughout the entire group? Is it different from different people or is there a way to even define it?

Yeah, you know, what holds it together is ideology. And that ideology is in common in a sense that most of them believe in this concept of jihad or struggle against the oppressive other religions that are oppressing their beliefs. But down at the personal level, it gets very different. It gets very unique. I mean, one of the crazy experiences I had working for peace was I ended up going up into Kashmir into the war zone about six weeks after the ceasefire happened at the end of 2002. I then went there very early in 2003 and it was a very hot zone. I mean, I was begged by people not to go there. My Indian friends were saying, look, you're going to get killed or kidnapped. You just cannot go up to Kashmir right now. But I felt this calling. I mean, in my prayers and meditation, I was just told to go. And when I'm told to go, I go. So I went within two hours of arriving in Kashmir and getting a certain tour of the Srinagar, the city, the capital of Indian part of Kashmir. I was then in a park and I sent my tour guide off. I said, hey, just give me some time alone. And I sat down to relax for a while. And after a few minutes, some local guys came and sat down about 40, 50ft away from me on the other side of this little wal in this elegant waterway pond. Persian gardens from the 16th century. These are traditional looking Kashmiri guys. And they said hallo to me in a German accent. I speak German, so I said hallo. And they obviously thought I was German and I could tell they wanted me to come over and talk And I decided to do that. And I went over and I sat down and we started to speak some German and then we moved to English because they couldn't really speak that much German and most people speak English, particularly Kashmir. And they asked me where I was from, thinking I was German or Swiss or Austrian because I speak German. And I said, I'm American. And they were shocked. These guys were absolutely stunned. And one of them started to twitch and started to scream at me and scream at the other guys. It ends up they were jihadis. And these guys had actually been Muslim freedom fighters. And they had all laid down their weapons and kind of gone back towards more normal lives to support their families. But, you know, everything, their whole world model came crashing down when they invited a European guy to come over and sit with them, and it ends up he's an American. And when I interviewed these guys for like an hour and a half and we got past the tension point, which was very hot for a while, it was a very scary situation. And what I learned at the end of the day is, you know, these are humans. They got sucked up into being jihadis because they felt that the Indian government had been discriminating and been very violent against Muslims in Indian casual Kashmir. I'm sure there's people in the other part of Kashmir that feel the Pakistan government's done the same thing. But they expressed their views and we had this long conversation. And the truth is, at the end of the day, what these people really wanted was peace in their country. They wanted their country to be left alone by all superpowers in the neighborhood, India and Pakistan. If anything, they wanted to be protected by the US if the US would ever do it. So they could just be independent and have their own life as Kashmiris. But. But it was the only kind of face to face encounter I had with people that would be called jihadis. And what I learned is that they're human beings, that through the war they grew up in and that they experienced and they jumped in and got pulled into, their lives changed. So I think the way to understand these terror networks is they're social networks that young people that are either educated but feel disgruntled and feel insulted wherever they are around the world, or they don't have that much to do back in the Middle east, get pulled into. They get pulled into their social networks, they adopt an ideology, and this is a way for them to have an impact in the world that feels meaningful to them. And I also like Jessica Stern's work at Harvard. I think Jessica has done the best work on the psychology of terrorism. And she says the leading cause of terrorism is humiliation is when a people feel humiliated that their culture has been insulted or humiliated and that they have less access to economic opportunity than other people. These are the key driving factors through time that have led societies to develop terror movements. And clearly we're seeing this terror movement of Al Qaeda and the sponsored or the groups that have modeled on them. But in the past, in so many different cultures in the world, terrorism has risen up as a way for people to express whatever frustration they and their culture feel in the world.

Wow, that's great insight that I did not expect. And, you know, on the flip side, the term you just said from Jessica Stern, humiliation. Can you talk a little bit about aa, Alcoholics Anonymous?

Sure.

You write about it a lot in the book. I will just say I very much admire what AA has done. I'm a marketer, and this is an organization that's been built not so through promotion, but through attraction of its voluntary contributions of its members. Many people that go into AA are at the depths of, I would say, humiliation, hopelessness, suffering. And through that Starfish organization, they find and connect with people that in many cases, believe in them more than they believe in themselves. And they find recovery and healing and the stopping of destructive behaviors and consumption of drugs and alcohol and everything that's been brought out. And I feel and believe in many good ways through that movement because there's so many. What I'm finding from having read the book and from just listening to you is that there's so much to be learned from all of the Starfish in so many different applications. So anything that you could talk about with what AA is for people that don't know and how it's a starfish and how it works would be really.

I totally agree with you, Joe. AA is a really wonderful organization. It's a precious organization. It has contributed to countless millions of lives on this planet. I have not been a member, although I had the great pleasure of attending an AA session as a guest in a city where guests were allowed. I've been a member of CEO groups that are support groups in a way, within a CEO association I'm part of, where we have support groups of 10 members that meet monthly to support each other in the personal life, family life, and business. And that's my own direct support group experience. And I've been in those for, like, 12 years and actually helped start nine different circles of those, which has been a great experience. But AA is a granddaddy of great decentralized social organizations. AA is organized around chapters. And a chapter is any two people or more that want to come together to help each other with their addiction to alcohol. The beauty of AA is there's a 12 step program that was developed back in the 1930s that still holds till today. It was developed by the founder of aa, Bill W. Who was someone who wanted to help other people and didn't want to take all the credit or put his name on it. So he created this basically a non profit organization with the 12 steps and the 12 principles and the 12 practices that told you how to change your own life for the 12 steps, how to run a chapter sort of in the 12 practices. The 12 principles are the overall value of the organization. It's now grown all over the world. It's probably in Almost all of 192 countries in the world today. And people go there and it's facilitated by a volunteer. There's no professional, but by a volunteer who shows up and says, I'm running this session today and I'm an alcoholic too and I'm here to learn what I can to share and help. And everyone there speaks, everyone participates. So it's just a beautiful organization. And the 12 step methodology that it developed is so successful and proven, it's been adopted in almost every successful addiction program around the world. And prior to AA appearing it was generally stated that alcoholism was an incurable disease, that there was no recorded instance in psychology and counseling of helping someone to move away from alcohol. And AA has been extremely successful. So I'm a big fan of it. It's an example of a decentralized network that's extremely positive in the world. And I think there's a lot more that we could start and build. One in the multi faith area, by the way, that relates to terrorism and the lack of understanding and everything else is the URI or the United Religions Initiative that forms circles. And to form a circle you have to have people from at least three different religious traditions. And then you get together and you have discussions and learn about each other's faiths. And you can work on different projects if you wish. But URI is a beautiful organization. Or you have seeds of peace between Israel and Palestine that create these circles of youth or adults that talk in dialogue. So there's a great power of coming together in a small circle of humans between say 2 and 10 or even 10 to say 30 people. There's a tremendous power of sitting around the campfire, as it were, and listening to each other's stories. So I love AA2. It's an absolute masterpiece, Brilliantly designed and has greatly benefited our world.

Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, one of the things that I want to be involved in is with my friend Dr. Edward Hollowell and many others is develop, for lack of what else to call it, a social network for add, ADHD and addiction. Because there's so much closely linked, really, all based on driving people towards the ability to have discussions with each other. Because that's where the help and assistance stems from, is the ability of putting people with mutual thoughts, ideas, goals, objectives, and mutual suffering together to help overcome it. And what was always fascinating to me about aa, let me also mention that in the last year I've gone to three different conferences based on all for therapists. I went to one, kind of like every industry has their trade shows and their conventions and stuff. I went to one that was all therapists. And it was funny because everyone thought I was a doctor, but I registered like a doctor. You look like a doctor. Yeah, exactly. And I went to an addiction conference recently and I actually asked this whole room full of therapists that many work at inpatient centers and have private practices and many write books and stuff like that. I said, have you ever seen a person recover from any form of addiction without 12 step programs? I asked the speaker that was presenting and she said no. And then she asked the whole room, she said, do any of you know of anyone that's ever had long term recovery without 12 steps? And no one said, yes, we have. So there is no recovery without 12 steps. And this is coming from a group of. So I look at AA as being such a fascinating thing. And I believe the reason it's a starfish is because it simply works and it has done so much to help people. And the last thing I'll say about it is Bill W. The founder, had a line that he's been quoted with saying that as alcoholics, we're trying to drink God out of a bottle. And I just thought that was a fascinating statement because there's a huge link between people searching for this dark void in their lives and themselves and looking for spirituality. Many people have found God or spirituality a higher power through AA or offshoots of AA, the 12 step program that literally have given up on God through religion and other vehicles. So it's very interesting. Of course, we could probably talk for an hour.

Well, actually, I'd like to pick up on this and relate it back to the starfish and spider framework, because just as we're talking right now. I've had a new insight about this, which is if you map out, if you take a line on a piece of paper and draw it from the left side of the paper to the right, and the left side is centralized and the right side is decentralized. We've always said, and the spider is on the left, it's centralized and the starfish is on the right. We've always said there's a line of trust and control in centralized systems. You have a lot of control on the left side, so control is high. Well, as you move to the other side, you have to give up control. You have to make that move like Wikipedia did when they went from NUPDIA to Wikipedia and say, we'll let anybody write, we'll let anybody edit. You have to give up control and you have to trust others. What's interesting about aa, as you look at, I was just thinking about the first step is to admit that you're powerless over alcohol and that your life has changed. And the second step is to believe that a power greater than ourselves is necessary to restore us to our sanity. It's really about surrendering control. The foundation of the 12 step program, step number one is to admit you have a problem and then to surrender and say, you know what, I can't do this myself. In other words, I'm not in control here. I've got to hand over control to a higher power. So I've always talked about the control, the trust, control trade off. But I never thought about. AA is actually a very starfish like organization because it starts. The first two steps are about acknowledging the situation and acknowledging one's lack of control and then handing it over to the divine. So it's the ultimate surrender.

You're absolutely right. My first introduction to AA was when I worked at a mental hospital when I was going to New Mexico State University. And I used to drive a lot of the patients of this hospital to AA meeting, which is Narcotics Anonymous and we used to drive the Cocaine Anonymous. And I actually used to sit in, in on the open meetings with these addicts and I just know from firsthand experience it works. And it is an amazing organization and there's so much to be learned from it. I think people that have no addiction whatsoever can learn tremendous amounts of just life and compassion in general from what they've done. And to talk about control and giving up control. My friend Dan Sullivan, who actually first introduced me to your book, he is the founder of the company Strategic Coach, but he has this line where he says, I don't want to be in control of anything in my company. I just want to be in charge. He very much is a big fan of delegation and runs a wonderful organization. Their marketing is referrals. Their company, the starfish part of Strategic Coach is that so many people have such a great experience with them. They tell other people about it. So my next question for you, because I know we're limited on time, here is what you write about in the book A Catalyst. You talk about catalysts and starfish organizations. And in order for a starfish organization to start, first, if you could define what a catalyst is, what traits they possess, I guess. And is a catalyst necessary for a starfish organization to start?

Yeah, it is necessary to have a catalyst. The first thing you got to have is an energy. You've got to have some energy that's either around passion or around pain or around a physical need. So you look at aa, the pain was alcoholism and the catalyst was Bill W. Bill W. Said, and he learned from the Oxford Group, which I think came out of the Lutheran church, but Oxford group had a seven step program and he learned from them, but he said, it's not enough, it's not clear enough and it needs to be multi faith and it needs to be this and that. So Bill took the pain of alcoholism and then developed a methodology. And he started with one little circle or chapter and then it was so successful. Then the question came, do you build a big organization? He goes, no, you let anybody else who wants to build a chapter start a chapter. Well, who do they register with? Well, they don't register with anybody, but we give them tools if they want tools. Here's the 12 step program. So a catalyst is a lot like that or like Craigslist. Craig is someone who likes people to network in communities and to share openly and share for free. So he created Craigslist as this open sharing site. So as the catalyst comes in and creates, it takes a set of values. And so like Bill W. Had a strong belief in God and the fact that God was necessary by whatever name and whatever flavor or tradition ones comes from that God is essential for personal transformation. He brought in a set of values and then practices. Craig brought in values of like things should be free, people should share for free. People should have privacy. The catalyst brings these values and they set up the system or the protocols for how the organization works. And when someone does that right then a network begins to grow and to flourish. Whether that network is AA or whether it's Craigslist or On the tragic flip side, you look at what Bin Laden did with Al Qaeda when he just came up with a great architecture for a decentralized terror network, which is very sad because it has such a negative impact. But he was the cattle together with other people. And to be as a leader, as a catalyst. And we're looking more at how do we connect other people together, how do we get system and processes in place that maximize people's involvement, whether they're customers or whether they're our employees. How do we get them to brainstorm with each other or to take responsibility or to, I don't know, move the group forward or move towards their passions. And so, so the catalyst is a very different style than a CEO. And in the world we're moving towards, which is so much based on the Internet, which itself is a starfish network, there's more opportunities now for catalysts to have a real impact, a positive impact on the world than ever before. Wow, that's wonderful.

I mean, I would like to think of myself as being in that sort of direction. I mean, one of the things that I very much have been sitting on hold with, and believe it or not, one of the things I've been looking forward to with this interview is just to further my insight, which really has stemmed from your book about something I'm doing with one of my. I wouldn't call it necessarily a business because the revenue we've brought in from it, I've always donated it to charity. Is a thing called ethicalservices.com, which I, in my world of teaching marketing, I went on ABC's 20 20. They did a show back in 1999 is when it first started, and they featured ethical on their website at ABC did a show with Barbara Walters exposing unethical advertisers. And part of one of the things I've wanted to do is give consumers a place to find business owners that agree to not use misleading advertising, guarantee their work, carry proper insurance, not employ technicians and employees in a way that forces them to do high pressure selling in order to make a livable wage and all kinds of criteria that I would consider a great thing that I would want if I was doing business with someone. And I wanted to set this up to become a starfish organization so it's user generated content without me having to necessarily police the system, have the community police the system and have a place where people can link up and do all of that. So I really, really had to think through how do I actually build this into a starfish organization. So having said that, and the reason I brought it up is I would imagine after listening to what we've talked about, reading your book, a lot of the entrepreneurs out there are going to think to themselves, okay, well how do I really start a starfish organization? What do I do? And I know that this could be a very long question. If you could just talk to that or maybe give a recommendation or suggestion including anything that you're doing in the future that would help people. Anything that your company does that create could assist our listeners with this.

Absolutely. A few pointers. The first is in reading the book, it will help give anyone a real quick sense of the difference between a starfish and a spider and the different organizational styles. And I think that's just useful to get awareness. Then you want to look at, as a manager at every decision you make and say, is this decision I'm making, is it moving my organization towards more empowering the other people in it and being more starfish like or empowering the customers? Or am I pulling back control again to try to get it my way, what I think is the right way? And oftentimes we make a short term decision which is better. But if we've robbed other people of their participation, we may get the right short term decision, but weaken the collaboration and participation. So becoming aware of that, the next thing to do is focus on list, focus on listening and focus on getting in circles with your employees or your customers. I hired a management coach about eight years ago, Sarah Nolan, and she'd been a successful CEO and executive. And the first thing she told me to do, and I was young, I was 32, and I was running a company that I was soon to take public and did take public. And she goes, rod, your company's growing really fast. You used to know everybody. You don't even know everyone anymore. You've got a couple hundred employees. I want you to have a luncheon once a week. And we did it on Thursdays at a Chinese restaurant. We have a private room and there would be 12 of us. The 12 were employees chosen at random, literally at random, off of a spreadsheet, regardless of title, position, years of the company. And all we did was introduce each other and then let them talk about the company or anything they wanted to. And I just listened. My goal there was to listen and learn. I did not take action. I did, I did not take responsibility to fix any problems. I would not circumvent the hierarchy. In other words, someone might complain about their VP or a boss or this or that and I would just listen and learn. But it was just a discussion format. I did that every single week for two years except when I was like on a travel or a vacation or something. I'd even do it in all of our overseas offices. And it transformed my understanding of my own organization and it moved our culture into being much more collaborative and much more non hierarchical because all the VPs would come in too and notice that I was just listening to all the employees and never telling them what to do and never telling them what the solution was. Just listening and letting them share. The best thing you can do as a business owner is just go listen to your employees once a week. You don't have to be the expert. That's a very simple technique. The next thing is just how you run your processes and how you run your meetings. Like at we have a weekly management meeting and I'm there. I don't run it. I let other people run the meeting. I know how to run meetings. I want everybody else to learn how to run meetings so they can run meetings when I'm not there with other people that they're going to be managing in the future or other projects they're involved in. And it sounds subtle, but it's just a fundamental assumption I have is I don't need to run that meeting. I already know what the agenda is and everyone needs to go and run through it. And someone can moderate that themselves and drive. So there's a lot of things that you can do and I hope that these are a couple of helpful hints. If you've got any questions, go to my website to beckstrom.com www beckstrom.com that's B E C K-S-T R O M dot com. You can even pose your questions and I'll answer them there because I'm not able to answer all the emails that come in. But I do take an hour or two every week to answer questions that come up on the website.

Great. I imagine that with what you just explained, listening to people and stuff and having the development of a starfish organization or at least parts of your organization be starfish.

Ish.

I don't know if that's a real.

Starfish bike or starfish. That's good too. Let me tell you something. I met someone who helps decide what new words come in the English language. She's one of the top etymologists at Oxford English Dictionary. And I said what's the definition of a new word? She says it's any expression a person uses. So starfish Ish is a word too.

Good. Just at this moment. I now proclaim it to be a word.

Exactly.

That's the Catalyst movement I'm doing here. I guess you cannot have a big ego. Big egos probably do not help people in organizations. Maybe if they're a great spider, they help. I would just imagine in a starfish.

The ego tends to be the enemy of the catalyst and the enemy of starfish organizations. The ego. All of our egos want control, want power, want to take credit, want to get the money, whatever it is, and tend to pull things in general towards centralization and a false sense of control. Gotcha.

Yeah, absolutely. You have a couple more minutes that I could ask you one more question? I wrote down a little note that said favorite story. The book really is fascinating and I would encourage everybody to read it as soon as possible. And once you read it, I'm sure you will totally agree with me that it is a very important and very good book. You and Ori, your co author, tell some pretty amazing stories throughout the book. Do you have a favorite?

Oh, gosh, do I have a favorite? Yeah. One of my favorites was when we were interviewing Dave Garrison, who is the chairman and CEO of Netcom Tom Online, which was an early Internet service provider or isp, and he was just hired for the job and they're trying to take the company public and he had to fly to Paris, France to meet with these French investors. And Dave is explaining that they're doing an Internet service providing company and they're leveraging the Internet to provide these services. And one of the investors says, well, who's the president of the Internet? And Dave said, well, there is no president of the Internet because there's not even a headquarters. It's just a set of protocols that people agree to and everyone's using it. So it's spreading like crazy. And the investigator said, no, no, no, you're not answering my question. Who is the president of the Internet? And Dave kept trying to explain, there is no headquarters, there is no president. It's just a protocol. It's the Internet protocol and people use it. And anyone that uses it extends the network. If their network connects to it, it grows. And the guy just didn't get it. And he said, I want to know who is the president of the Internet. And David realized he was never going to be able to explain it to this guy. And he wanted to move ahead and sell stock and securities. So he said, okay, sir, just so you understand and feel more comfortable, I want to let you know I am the president of the Internet and the gentleman said okay and went on with the meeting. So it wasn't just Al Gore that invented the Internet at that moment in that time in Paris, France, my friend Dave Garrison did too.

That is comedy. That is total comedy. Yes, you will read that story and so many more and your really phenomenal book. Could you please give out your website again and any other information for any of our listeners that would like to follow up on you and find out what you're doing and stuff?

Sure. I keep a list of my current activities and passions on www.bechstrom.com. there's also a ton of information there about the book. You can pick up the book at Borders or Barnes and Nobles or most business bookstores. You can certainly get it on Amazon.com online or Barnes & Noble's online. It's going into 10 languages already, so it's already come out in Italian and Chinese and Spanish and it's going to be coming out in Korean and Thai and German and many other languages. We would love to see it in more. So please enjoy it in your native language. And we hope you find the tools and concepts of the starfish and the spider useful and enriching for your own life and your own organization, not only for business, but for your nonprofit. And Joe, just thank, thank you again so much for giving me this opportunity and thank.

You. And Rod, if you're ever open or available for it, I would love to do a follow up interview with you sometime in the future because I know that you're doing a lot of really cool things. And again, I can't say enough about how much I found value in your book, which is why I wanted to bring this interview to all my listeners because I believe they'll find tremendous value. And also this interview has been a tremendous valuable. So thank you so much. And to all my listeners, please give me your feedback on what you felt of this interview with Rod and go out and get the book right away and have yourselves a wonderful Starfish ish type of day. So thanks again, Rod. I appreciate.

It. Thank you.