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The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations
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Sales rank 64,709
Customers rating (based on 89 reviews)
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Understanding the amazing force that links some of today's most successful companies If you cut off a spider's leg, it's crippled; if you cut off its head, it dies. But if you cut off a starfish's leg it grows a new one, and the old leg can grow into an entirely new starfish. What's the hidden power behind the success of Wikipedia, craigslist, and Skype? What do eBay and General Electric have in common with the abolitionist and women's rights movements? What fundamental choice put General Motors and Toyota on vastly different paths? How could winning a Supreme Court case be the biggest mistake MGM could have made? After five years of ground-breaking research, Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom share some unexpected answers, gripping stories, and a tapestry of unlikely connections. The Starfish and the Spider argues that organizations fall into two categories: traditional "spiders," which have a rigid hierarchy and top-down leadership, and revolutionary "starfish," which rely on the power of peer relationships. The Starfish and the Spider explores what happens when starfish take on spiders (such as the music industry vs. Napster, Kazaa, and the P2P services that followed). It reveals how established companies and institutions, from IBM to Intuit to the US government, are also learning how to incorporate starfish principles to achieve success. The book explores: * How the Apaches fended off the powerful Spanish army for 200 years * The power of a simple circle * The importance of catalysts who have an uncanny ability to bring people together * How the Internet has become a breeding ground for leaderless organizations * How Alcoholics Anonymous has reached untold millions with only a shared ideology and without a leader The Starfish and the Spider is the rare book that will change how you understand the world around you.
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| Publisher | Portfolio Hardcover | | Release date | 10/2006 | | Availability | Usually ships in 24 hours | | Edition | Hardcover |
| | List price | $24.95 | | Our price | $16.47 (you save 33.99%) | | Used price | from $2.78 |
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 Great reference for Tea Party leaders
I found this book to be a great reference for those of us who have risen up within the grassroots leaderless groups known as Tea Parties. Although at first I immediately identified the starfish as the Tea Party Movement, I later realized in the book that the hybrid model was exactly what has made the 500-location North American company I work for and many others so successful. This book provides plenty of examples and invokes thought into why some very large top-down spider-like organizations have failed when the "head of the spider" is removed. I highly recommend this book to anyone in a management position.
The Decentralized Advantage - Organizational Evolution
This book is very enlightening.
Talks about centralized and decentralized organizations.
Centralized is the spider who has a head that tells the organization what to do.
Decentralized is the starfish who has legs but no head and they work in concert with each other supporting the structure.
If you cut of the head off a spider you kill the organization.
If you cut of the leg off a starfish it just regenerates a new one.
This book looks at how that has happened in history from Cortez who cut off the head of Montezuma and toppled the Aztec (a spider) empire & how Cortez failed when he met the Apache Indians in New Mexico (a starfish) and how this is happening today with record companies trying to cut off the heads of music sharing websites only to see three more pop up the next day. This is a very good study and interesting read on how we as a society and World are progressing towards a quantum world where large corporations will no longer be able to hoard and profit. We are in an evolutionary stage where companies are trying to figure out how to stay in business and adapt to the new models. A must read for anyone who owns a company or is going to start an organization
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 Starfish, Spiders, and the Fringe
Ori Brafman, this time with Rod Beckstrom, turns in a great book about the characteristics and behaviors of decentralized organizations. Of course we all know by now that here in the Internet age, knowledge of decentralized organizations has become increasingly important, so this book is richly on point.
The authors suggest several strategies for dealing with decentralized organizations that affect your company, backed up with either real-life examples or anecdotally. Central to those strategies is an overarching theme about gaining information from the "fringes" of a traditional organization, so that strategic alternatives may be formed more effectively.
My only concern with this tactic, which the authors call "appreciate inquiry" (I have also seen this concept labeled as "radical transactiveness."), is that by seeking information for strategic improvement from the "fringe" of an organization, the seeker must be sure that the "fringe" actually has the correct information to enable a strategic solution. It would seem that by calling the group, from which information is sought, the "fringe" that group would, by the nature of its label, appear not to possess the information that is key to resolving problems.
Although the authors communicate that the "fringe" that should be engaged in appreciative inquiry would have the needed information, I feel that they don't drive this point home far enough and by calling the group a "fringe," the reader could be misled as to that group's value. Perhaps it would have been better to label the group as the "intelligent cloud," a term that would imply their knowledge while communicating that the group is not normally in the center of the organization's action.
Are you a Catalyst?
Rod is now head of ICAAN the Internet naming registry and the position is I think very appropriate given his insights into self organizing systems versus hierarchical ones. As we have become more interconnected as a species the ability for self assembling organizations to flourish and to become quickly more robust than traditional command and control organizations is manifest and this is very nicely demonstrated in his book.
What fascinated me most though was Rod introduced me to a new kind of person different from the Mavens and connectors or Malcolm Gladwel's The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference and that type of person is a catalyst and I am grateful to Rod for giving me a label that fits to hang over my bathroom mirror because for years I knew what I did I just could not explain it and no I can and indeed have take it further in my own book Stone Soup: The Secret Recipe for Making Something from Nothingdemonstrating that catalysts are vital to any endeavor whether self organizing or not.
I recommend this book for anyone who knows that they add more value than their job description and is searching for a concept that defines them and their value to their organisation whatever that organization might be. If you are the one who makes things really happen you might just be a catalyst.
An absolute favorite- a must read!
I enjoyed this book very much- it built on many of the concepts in other books like The Wisdom of Crowds and The Tipping Point but presents it in a new way with a new focus. A well written (sometimes funny) and insightful book. I highly recommend it!
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