What Rod's Been Up To
Rod has been very busy with speaking engagements since the publication of the September newsletter. Noteworthy events include his presentation to the Society of International Business Fellows in Los Angeles on September 29th. Rod spoke to SIBF about the Starfish and Spider principles and related them to the good work of SIBF members around the world helping the poor and working for poor and improved Track II diplomatic efforts.
In October, Rod also presented to the Saints VC Annual Meeting in Tiburon, California and gave a keynote to the InfoSys Technologies Confluence in Miami, Florida. Another highlight in Rod's schedule was the Environmental Defense board meeting Rod attended in New York City in early October.
Rod spent most of November speaking overseas. Events he presented at included Web 2.0 Berlin in Germany, a YPO Lebanon Chapter Meeting in Beirut, the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Amsterdam, and DIFCweek in Dubai. The Dubai presentation is historic in the sense that after Rod presented the economics and mechanisms of carbon markets, the attendees took several votes and then 79% of the audience voted that the Gulf states (GCC) including the United Arab Emirates and Dubai, should consider taking on binding carbon caps or limits. This outcome was reported in the local press. This represents an interesting possible step for some of the GCC states to join the Kyoto Protocol as countries with carbon limits, or towards creating a regional cap and trade market similar to what California and the Northeastern U.S. States are doing. Read a very informative article about Rod's DIFCweek in Dubai presentation supplied by BusinessIntelligence - Middle East.
Rod has also recently interviewed someone prominent in modern day history: Dan Dudek, one of the original architects and drafters of the Kyoto Protocol. We will be sharing highlights from the interview in future issues of this newsletter.
The German edition of Rod's book, Der Seestern und die Spinne was released last month. As part of the launch, Rod presented at the New Thinking Store to Germany's top bloggers while he was in Berlin for the Web 2.0 Expo conference.
Rod recently created two new FaceBook communities, and invites you to join these groups. Check them out by logging in to your FaceBook account and then clicking these links: The Starfish and the Spider Group and the TWiki community.
Take the Poll
We've discovered that Rod's book has its own growing starfish movement. The Starfish and Spider has been proliferating itself across the pirate sites. So far, around 1,000 pirated copies of the book have been downloaded. Rod's inclination is to do nothing, and allow the viral spreading of the starfish message to continue since it would be difficult to stop anyway. However, he's interested in your opinion on this, and invites you to cast your vote on whether or not you think we should take action against those who are giving away the book for free. Take the poll at beckstrom.com/poll.
What Rod's Been Reading
I just finished reading the entertaining and informative Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes by Mark J. Penn and E. Kinney Zalesne. Penn is CEO of Burson-Marsteller, a top global PR firm, and is a consummate poller. This book covers hundreds of starfish-like decentralized micro-trends popping up across the U.S. Like how 1% of young boys now wish to be snipers—a fact that has never appeared in previous surveys. Or how the New Luddites movement, composed of people who had previously used the internet but have stopped, has grown to 15 million people. While many of us are flocking to the newest online gizmos, the New Luddites want to get away from them.
Why do these trends matter? Because they drive business, they drive society and they effect elections, a preoccupation of co-author Penn. The lower cost of polling now makes it possible to track finer and finer demographic slices. What makes this polling possible? The proliferation of low cost (read starfish) networks.
Are most trends headed in a starfish direction? No, much to my own surprise, according to Microtrends, religious groups across almost all faiths that are led by men and which shun women leaders are actually expanding their market share. While the book shares the data, it does not explain why. Causation isn’t readily squeezed from survey data.
Nor does it explain the newest starfish development—picotrends.
Using the internet, it is possible to identify tiny new groups and deliver products to just a few people. Just witness the incredible levels of product specialization on eBay and Craigslist, or note the fine tuned Google Adwords or Yahoo! campaigns that now appear when you search on a very specific term. How far can it go? All the way down to markets defined by one person, or one aspect of a person, taking it to the extreme. In any event, Microtrends is a quick and worthy read.
Starfish Principles at Work - Neighborhood America
We interviewed Kim Kobza of Neighborhood America to learn how they apply starfish principles.
Neighborhood America has built a business around social networks that you call high value communities. What are high value communities?
These are communities with a specific purpose, as opposed to traditional social networks that are designed and built for creating relationships amongst people. In high value communities, there is a very clearly defined purpose, and the communities are designed to achieve that result, whether it be better health care, better transportation projects, or in the commerce communities, better product and service delivery, better decisions, better partner support.
How do you create communities that can transform the collective wisdom of consumers into actionable business intelligence for the hosting business organization?
Establish Clear Expectations
For a community network to have value for a business, it must also be beneficial for the members. Participants in a high value community have to feel like they can make a difference.
When a business considers building an online community to drive value, it needs to consider the same behaviors that drive participation in physical communities. For example, there needs to be clear expectations. A business can tell a consumer base, “We’re establishing a consumer community, and the purpose is to listen to you. We’d like to engage you in a discussion of how we can better serve you, and create better products and services. We’d like you to provide us with feedback, and on the basis of that feedback we’re going to do the following…” So the consumer has a very clear expectation of what’s in it for them. This principle also works for an employee community, a partner community, or stakeholders in a business.
Build Trust
Also, the business needs to build a trusted relationship with its community. Trust needs to be much more than just the feeling of integrity. Stephen Covey addresses this in his recent book, The Speed of Trust. He says creating trust is about getting results. When businesses build communities, they have to do so in a way that produces results for their members, so they satisfy their members' desire to make a difference.
Create Structure
A distinguishing characteristic in high value communities to achieve trust is structure, both from a technology and an organizational standpoint. This involves all forms of data, delivered across all types of devices, properly categorized and reportable. You can use analytics—things that provide meaning to data. Review of content prior to publication would be another element of structure.
All of us have specific products and services we use which could motivate us to participate in a community. For me, the obvious one is the airline industry. I do an extensive amount of travel, and every time I come away feeling that things could work so much better if the airline would just listen to the travelers. Virtually every organization, whether in the area of government, health care, education, media or the corporate environment, can benefit in some way from community.
This relates to one of the theses in The Starfish: that listening to and drawing from the collective consciousness of many to help us make decisions is much more powerful than internal decision making in a more isolated environment. And if you do it wrong, it can be just as powerful in a negative way. If you fail, and don’t deliver on the promises made to your community, or if you don’t meet expectations and don’t do what you said you would do, that can be powerfully negative.
How does Neighborhood America help businesses avoid such a negative result?
We provide a platform in a Net-Native Software as Service (SaS) model, which means that we provide, on scale, the application—the tier one infrastructure for engineering and service. This includes all the best practices from the knowledge we’ve learned by building these communities over a long period of time. We think the model of software service is perfect for community building. Any organization that is building high value communities and wants to be trusted needs to employ security of data and privacy principles. The many promises you make depend on the technology model. That’s why the Net-Native SaS model is particularly appropriate for community building. Outside of search, this is the fastest growing segment of the technology industry today.
This concept may be foreign to many businesses. We say we listen, but do we really? We send surveys out, and may utilize a CRM system for intake of customer comments, but in the context of a traditionally engineered process, we don’t really listen. The big change that’s taking place today is that we’re starting to understand that there’s value in that listening, and now we can actually do it on scale, and reach customers we never would have reached before.
Again, books like The Starfish help lead us towards an understanding that there is business value in developing listening behaviors. It goes toward the trust that is absolutely critical in a high value community. All of these changes are converging in our society and in our technology industry at the same time to create some really exciting opportunities. They promise to re-architect the way we do business and the way we govern.
You have said that leadership is critically important in high value communities to encourage the free exchange of ideas and content. How would you compare the leadership style needed to make this happen with the catalyst type of leadership described in The Starfish and the Spider?
The importance of catalysts is that they convey the sense of the possible when they connect people with each other. So the connectedness is very critical. It’s a leadership style where you try to involve more and more people, in a trusted way, into a community. As opposed to the common autocratic leadership style, the catalyst is becoming a much more acceptable leadership style within these communities, because they inherently understand the value of connecting the members within the community. And they value all the members equally, in the sense that they don’t rank them—they’re assuming that each member brings a diverse experience to the community, and though different, no one experience is less valuable than another.
Catalysts also promote a very clear sense of vision, and a very clear sense of the possible in terms of what can actually be achieved with the community. The catalyst as a leader is critical to the success of a high value community.
Conclusion
The real opportunity here is to use the understanding of community to create engagement which drives a much more meaningful value. Organizations that are doing this well, and really master community building and engagement, will have a very pronounced competitive advantage over those that do not. The successful organizations will have achieved an emotional engagement with their consumers. That will be the real economic engine in our future, and the same applies in governance models as well.
A city, county or state that really listens to its citizens will be able to make better decisions, leading to a higher quality life and service delivery on the part of government; and will have a competitive advantage in recruiting new businesses and attracting the most skilled and talented people. This is a big change that will happen in our world. It will transform everything we do, in every business, agency, heath care organization, and educational system.
If you look at this on a global basis, those countries that listen to their citizens well will be relatively competitive to those countries that do not. Countries with emerging economies that embrace community building and collective intelligence will grow at faster rates than those that do not.
At Neighborhood America we’ve built highly scalable systems to enable the building of these types of communities. That’s what’s going to be required for change. It’s not going to be enough to throw a FaceBook or MySpace type site at these types of challenges. You’re going to need a much more highly engineered technology, platform, and way to deliver it, with the services and understanding for successfully building high value communities that will benefit all who are involved.
Kim Patrick Kobza is President and CEO of Neighborhood America. Learn more about how this innovative company uses starfish principles to enable business, media and government to build social networks at an enterprise level at NeighborhoodAmerica.com.
An example of one application of Neighborhood America's ideas for social networking is available at connect2elect.com, where you can quickly discover which political candidates are most (and least) aligned with you on a highly personalized level.
 Interview with Maria Sipka on Linqia
We interviewed Maria Sipka, creator of The Community Girl, about her latest project.
Q: What is Linqia?
A: Linqia offers users the ability to search online communities and groups. We aggregate group profiles directly from social networks and community platforms and enable users to rate, comment, search, join and recommend interesting groups. Users can also add groups and claim groups which they own or moderate. The social vision is the driving force of Linqia. By aggregating all communities and groups which exist on the internet today our vision over the next 3-5 years is to partner with leading social technology entrepreneurs and enable people and community leaders in developing worlds to connect online to communities and groups in the developed world. There are millions of baby boomers entering into retirement who have acquired knowledge, skills and opportunities and have the ability to make a difference to the developing world who are hungry for this knowledge. Linqia will facilitate this exchange.
Q: Why did you start Linqia?
A: At some point in time, most people come to realize that life is very short. For the first 10 years of my professional life I had dedicated every day to achieving my dream of becoming financially independent. My family immigrated to Australia from communist Czechoslovakia in the late 70's with $400 in their pocket, not speaking English and with two children under the age of three. My father’s dream was for his children to experience a life of freedom and opportunity. By the age of 28 I had achieved my dream and fulfilled my father’s dream. I tasted freedom and learned how to identify opportunities and realize value in every sense. I also learned that who you become will be determined by the books you read and the people you meet.
No longer driven by financial goals I set out to discover my new life purpose. Leaving a 12 year relationship, my family, friends and my business I traveled the world for two years meeting hundreds of entrepreneurs through the Entrepreneur Organization and hearing their stories. I was in search of who I was, what I had to contribute to the world and how I could translate this into value.
Three things happened. I immersed myself in social networking and building online communities and groups. I found my purpose to be connecting the developing world to the developed world through online communities and groups. And I met Rod Beckström, who opened my mind to leaderless organizations and decentralized networks.
Linqia—the starfish referenced in Rod's book—was born amongst four friends sitting on a Lisbon beach last October.
Q: What has been the public response to Linqia thus far?
A:The response from the public has been overwhelmingly positive. Currently there are over 1,000 social networking platforms and between 40 - 80 million groups. The problem is you can't find them. We are currently in private beta with Linqia and we invite readers of The Beckström Starfish Report exclusive access. Please send me an email at maria@mariasipka.com if you wish to preview the site.
Q: How were you inspired by starfish principles?
A: Having built numerous online communities after reading Rod's book, I made the decision not to consult or work with any organization which did not or were not willing to adopt the starfish principles. Communities which are self-serving, focusing on profit, will fail. What became clear was that the member must be at the core of a community. Not profits. Online communities are sensitive and delicate organisms and if members sense they are being sold to and constrained the community will inevitably die.
Linqia has no leaders. There is no command and control. We only hire catalysts and our style is to inspire others to take action. Our five values are: people, sharing, passion, communication and integrity. We have identified how Linqia significantly meets the needs, interests and benefits of every stakeholder.
Share Your Starfish Story -- Building a subculture of starfish, by Jeff Black
Within McDermott & Bull, the firm where I serve as an executive search consultant, a “starfish” kind of movement has begun—spearheaded by Jenn Moody, one of our team members. On September 23rd, a team of 20+ from our firm participated in the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure to fight breast cancer, a disease that affects 1 of every 8 women (yes, that’s right, 1 in 8!).
With Jenn encouraging us (our catalyst), and inspired by the mother of another of our team members currently recovering from the disease (our ideology), we have joined this cause to raise both awareness about the disease and money to help serve those who can’t afford testing or treatment. The volunteer effort among the people in our firm is a great example of a decentralized movement that will help to change the priorities, language, and the example set by those of us who participate.
Why should we consider doing things like this? Why not just go on our Machiavellian way and maximize wealth and pleasure without spending time and energy trying to help those who have less than we do?
Beyond it being just the right thing to do, there is also a very practical argument. Through our efforts to support underprivileged people and communities, some who otherwise may make choices out of desperation or disillusionment, we may help to reduce poor choices; I would argue that desperation and disillusionment contribute to a lot of ills in our society, so working to minimize them is in the best interest of everyone.
How much better could our world be if volunteerism, and the caring that goes along with it, could increase from the current 27% to even just 30-35%? It’s not so much to ask—the 27% number was only 21% less than 20 years ago. Our works and our words can help to make this possible. Let’s all consider what we can do to help make the example greater through our works and the voice louder through our words.
Jeff Black is Principal Consultant at McDermott & Bull. Read his complete blog post at
A Relationship Story - Building a subculture of starfish.
If you have a story to share that relates to starfish principles, please send it to newsletter@beckstrom.com and we'll post it in this section of a future issue.
Eco Corner — Sustainable Feasts: Eat close to home for the holidays, PLUS
Roundup of green gift ideas from Environmental Defense
It's easy to ensure that your holiday meals are full of the best flavors and the original spirit of the holiday if you choose locally grown and eco-regional foods. When shopping for holiday meals, keep in mind that local and eco-regional choices are not only the freshest food on the shelf, but they also have the smallest carbon footprint. One of the benefits of buying local is that you are automatically choosing what is in season. Even if you live in areas with climates that don't allow for year-round farming, you can still choose local meats, nuts, jams, jellies, etc. to reduce your carbon footprint.
There are many other ways to make your holidays green. Here is a list of intangible gifts from Environmental Defense that deliver green good long after the holidays (and won't end up as clutter in a closet). Some ways to give back to the earth:
- Donate time or money to a charity in honor of the gift recipient (a gift to Environmental Defense is a good choice).
- Buy carbon offsets in the recipient's name. Along with cutting your own carbon emissions — and fuel bills — help your friends and family offset theirs.
- Give a national parks pass or a membership to botanical gardens or aquariums. (For an extra-special gift, surprise with a cross-country train tour or an eco-vacation.
For more ideas from Environmental Defense, including green stocking stuffers for adults, sources for organic chocolate, recyling tips, board games, clothing and accessories, recycled jewelry and glassware, and MUCH MORE, see Green Gifts for the Holidays.
If you have an environmental pet peeve, or you champion an eco cause you'd like to see featured in a future issue, send it to newsletter@beckstrom.com.
Ask Rod
A reader asked the following question:
I'm currently reading your book, The Starfish and the Spider.
I have a somewhat unique vocational history. I spent over 35 years working for what is now AT&T. I began with Southwestern Bell Telephone Company which ultimately became SBC and then AT&T. I retired at the end of 2004, and most of my career was in human resources (employee benefits, staffing, labor relations, etc.). I spent the last 10 years of my career in the middle management ranks. However, at present I’m an associate pastor for adults at a Baptist church of some 3400 members in New Braunfels, Texas.
Your book certainly resonates with my experiences at SBC where we would have cycles of centralization and decentralization. Of course the company was truly forever and always a spider although some level of freedom was given during decentralization and the formation of profit center market areas.
Here is my question: From the perspective of religious organizations and in particular Christian churches in America, how would you see some of the principles in your book playing out in church life and the organizational structures found there?
Rod answers:
There have been a lot of books recently about organic churches and home based churches, among many other decentralized or starfish like movements. Also, the recent book Heroic Leadership, a 350-year history of the Jesuit order, is a great study of decentralization within an order of the Catholic Church.
Have a question about starfish principles and how to apply them you'd like to ask Rod? If so, go to Ask Rod and post your question. Rod will answer as many of your questions as he can, and your questions and answers will be published on Rod's BECKSTROM.COM website.
Starfish Tip of the Month for Your Business
Here's another free service that is useful for businesses with web pages that have a long URL …
At snipurl.com you can shorten a long URL so it's easier to paste into an email message, or give to people verbally. Here's how snipurl explains their service:
"Consider a web URL like the following (It is a real website, go ahead and click it if you wish) --
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00003CXZ3/ref%3Dsr%5Faps%5Fd%5F1%5F7/
103\538622451046/oihjgjhgfjkfhgfhg/867785/%3Dsr%5Faps%5Fd%5F1%5F7/1oihjgjhgfjkfhgf
hg/867785/obidos/ref%3Dsr%5Faps%5Fd%5F1%5F7/103-3538622451046252bTQRc5bB8Zoqtl
OeDdZwlJtHLgfMIVHUWlmPWw8uDAvn6M%252bkyj2OhU7lZS%252fzgR6gc6Gc6UR0nFUKiK
Z%252fUA1FA7i4GoxVbNUmI3sVoXmLsVCjdi1tcAxjLEEXFdAvuJU%252bwjYfFeWO15n%25
2fiFsgXNxKDxWULBFtyxoa65AuWb0a5SU%252ftWdT4P7e8CtC9acf37axZa%252fI2MWC7g54T
PL6YB%252bwcKdZuh60N%252fb83BrfUSLSD/5F7/103\538622451046
There are 513 characters in that URL, but after "snipping" the same above URL looks like this --
http://snipurl.com/d (20 characters) or
http://snipurl.com/memento (26 characters)
These shortened URLs are small so you can send them in emails without the fear of them wrapping, meaningful so you can remember and share them in the future, and permanent so if your underlying URL expires or changes you can always modify your snipped URL. (As a bonus, you can even see the popularity of you URLs by viewing how many people clicked on it)."
To actually make the snipped URL meaningful and memorable, you can edit the shortened version and use a nickname of your choosing.
Starfish & Spider Book Reviews (and other media appearances)
In a recent post, blogger zakstar
says, "Doesn’t piracy make for a delicious example of decentralized organizations? The music industry was the first in entertainment to face off against the amorphous starfish colony that commandeered digital distribution via sites like Napster and Kazaa." Read the entire review at Egging on the Starfish.
Hubertus Hoffmann, President and Founder of World Security Network Foundation (WSN), had this to say: "Many Japanese businesses are suffering under a tradition-bound Japanese culture of “consensus at any price” from top to bottom. They are organized centrally like spiders rather than decentralized like starfish—too slow in the rapid machinery of today’s globalization (see the new book of the member of the WSN International Advisory Board Rod Beckstrom, The Starfish and the Spider). You can read the entire article at Japan and Globalization.
Patrick de Laive, co-founder Fleck.com and initiator of The Next Web Conference posted a review of The Starfish and the Spider as an Expert Log post, along with a video interview with Rod. If you don't read German, you'll need to use a text translator for the review, but the interview's in English..
Blogger Robert Scoble introduces Darren Barefoot's graphic creation of Robert's social media starfish
concept in a recent post. It's an interesting visual representation of the evolving social media landscape, and stimulated quite a few comments.
Three Nobel Prizes for Starfish Ideas
All three Nobel prizes granted in the past month relate to starfish concepts.
The Nobel Prize in Economics was just granted to Leonid Hurwicz, Eric S. Maskin and Roger B. Myerson for their work on “mechanism design theory.” The mechanisms referred to are economic auction and other methods that create close to optimal markets, where open and liquid markets do not exist. Their fundamental realization was that decentralization was the key concept to making non-liquid markets work. Their work started with Hurwicz’s paper “On the Concept and Possibility of Informational Decentralization” (1969) and was further developed in “On Informationally Decentralized Systems” (1972).
One benefit of the work is that it explained why imperfect markets are better than socialism, or government controlled information or asset allocations. This result is profound and relates directly to the global warming problem and its probable solutions. Hence, the Nobel Prize in Economics this year was granted for theoretical work that affirms why the creation of carbon or pollution markets is the best approach on global warming, for which former Vice President Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) received the Nobel Peace Prize.
Gore is the one who advocated using binding limits on CO2 and other greenhouse gases, together with tradable permits—a so called cap and trade solution—to the UN meeting in Kyoto in 1996. That proposal, designed and drafted in large part by Dan Dudek, was approved and has already been responsible for a 20% reduction in greenhouse gases in Europe and Japan—compared to where pollution levels would be today without those caps. We look forward to featuring an exclusive interview with Dan in a future issue of this newsletter.
Thus the theoretical work of the three economists contributed to the economic models which support market based, as opposed to regulation based, solutions to global warming. When markets are created, the market responds in a decentralized fashion, with the most innovative, effective and low cost solutions for pollution reduction winning. This decentralized response fosters tens of thousands of individual starfish initiatives to meet the goal of cleaner, cooler skies.
Finally, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was granted to German scientist Gerhard Ertl for his work on catalysts. In chemistry, catalysts are molecules which do not change, but in whose presence other molecules and reactions change. Ertl studied how catalysts have this impact due to how other molecules interact with their molecular surfaces. Catalysts, ironically or fittingly, are a key technology used for cleaning up greenhouse gases and other air pollutants. Platinum is used as a catalysts in the exhaust system of cars to break down SO2 and other damaging acids. In fertilizer plants, platinum catalysts are using for breaking down N20, one of the most damaging of all greenhouse gases (310 times more damaging than CO2 according to the IPCC). In “The Starfish and The Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations,” we write about how catalysts are people in whose presence organizations and movements change, yet those people themselves may seem almost invisible or not change themselves.
When we read the announcement of the Nobel in Economics on the morning of October 16, we were stunned to realize that all three awards related directly to the concepts in the book. It’s been a good season for starfish thinkers.
Who We Are
Rod Beckström is an author, speaker, and the Chairman and Chief Catalyst of a new software company, TWIKI.NET. He founded CATS Software Inc., which he took public as CEO. Rod serves on the boards of Environmental Defense and Jamii Bora Africa Ltd. He is also on the board of the Pacific Council of Foreign Relations and on the Kiva.org Board of Advisors. Rod holds a BA and an MBA from Stanford and was a Fulbright Scholar. He lives in Palo Alto, California and can be contacted through BECKSTROM.COM.
The team at BECKSTROM.COM supports Rod with his writing, speaking engagements and web presence.
To inquire about booking Rod for a speaking engagement, contact speaking@beckstrom.com. To schedule an interview with Rod for your publication or blog, contact sandra@beckstrom.com.
© 2007 WWW.BECKSTROM.COM |
Something fun. Even though it has no special relationship to starfish principles, we thought you might enjoy this interesting 
by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom this afternoon, and want to recommend it to everyone I know in the entertainment, telecommunications, and Internet arenas. It’s compulsively readable, and at 208 pages of text, easy to knock out in one afternoon." –blogger zakstar, 