Terrorism Business Management

Mark D. Drapeau

Google is widely recognized as a modern American business success story, not only becoming enormously prominent and profitable, but also possibly rewriting the textbook on business management.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Anders* notes the hallmarks of Google’s novel business structure – radical decentralization, small self-managing teams, and an affinity for experimental and offbeat projects with little downside. Google’s overall strategy – to evolve as fast as the web – is innovative and has led to tremendous medium-term gains.

Rapid evolution and adaptation will almost certainly be a trait of other highly successful businesses of the future. Interestingly, and unfortunately, the description of Google’s organization and strategy does not differ very much from that of prominent terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda.

Al-Qaeda has a rapidly changing horizontal structure headed by an inspirational catalyst in the form of Osama bin Laden and other central figures. Knowing the overall goals of the organization, global terror cells can largely act independently at a tactical level. Al-Qaeda’s lack of structure and centralized command and control is a strength. Collective knowledge is diffusively stored throughout the system, making adaptation easy and destruction difficult.

In a recent book, the simple biological metaphor of the “starfish and the spider” has been used effectively to describe two different organizational structures. Most organizations are spiders – centralized, with subordinate units (legs) dependent on instructions from the command center (head).

Starfish are distinct because different parts can behave in a largely autonomous fashion. Like a starfish, Al-Qaeda’s different “legs” or cells can act independently, and when a leg is cut off a starfish, the base will regenerate the leg, and the leg can grow into a new starfish.

The U.S. and its allies might consider what starfish mean for fighting terrorism. Perhaps the most notoriously hierarchical and spider-like organization is that of a conventional military force. If Google feels the need for a starfish-like structure to “evolve faster than the web”, should the military and intelligence communities restructure – to a modest extent – such that they are capable of evolving faster than Al-Qaeda? As in the past, the corporate business and national security communities have a lot they can learn from each other.

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Mark D. Drapeau, Ph.D. is the AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow at the National Defense University of the U.S. Department of Defense. These views are his own and not necessarily those of NDU, the DoD, or the U.S. Government.

*George Anders, “Why Google Inspires Diverging Case Studies”, WSJ, 15 Aug 2007, p. A2.