The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations
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Product Description
If you cut off a spider’s head, it dies. But if you cut off a starfish’s leg, it grows a new one, and that leg can grow into an entirely new starfish. Traditional top-down organizations are like spiders, but now starfish organizations are changing the face of business and the world.
What’s the hidden power behind the success of Wikipedia, Craigslist, and Skype? What do eBay and All-purpose Electric have in common with the abolitionist and women’s rights movements? What fundamental choice place All-purpose Motors and
After five years of ground-breaking research, Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom share some unexpected answers, gripping tales, and a tapestry of unlikely relations. 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.
It reveals how customary companies and institutions, from IBM to Intuit to the
* 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 mysterious 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 lacking a leader.
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Unlike his additional book “the perfect mess” this book starts out with strong and very excellent thoughts, but then progressively gets worse as you flip the pages.
The leader has about 3 excellent examples in the book, but keep reiterating the same points he covered at the begining of the book. The final 3 chapters felt like a last attempt to fill the book with pages.
Skip this book if you read “the perfect mess”. Get it if you’ve never seen the additional book.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
Like Steven Levitt’s “Freakonomics”, “The Starfish and the Spider” is a single cogent chapter surrounded by 160 pages of pabulum.
While the book is derivative, trotting out ancient canards to make and re-establish a point, the initial premise is intriguing. Organizations that resemble a starfish are more successful than persons that are patterned on the spider. I’ll place to Mssrs. Brafman and Beckstrom to make their own case.
There are several maddeningly infuriating statements in the book. On one had the authors praise the efforts of a an animal rights liberal who teaches others on the fine points of sabotaging hunts. These new volunteers head into the woods, stalk hunters, and then disrupt the hunt by using airhorns or driving the game away. (Let’s not even go THERE, into the discussion of the morals of hunting.) Later, in the same chapter, the same aw-shucks marvel is offered to a group of vigilantes in an unknown country who go out hunting al-Qaeda cells with government supplied ammunition and no due process. What are the lessons here?
The value in the book is the main premise. Read chapters 1 and 5 and, by George, you’ve got it!
Also, I am weary of every business book taking the obligatory shots against record marks while lauding the “democratization” of composition through on-line sharing. How about a name scanning this book in a PDF format, and, using a starfish organization, putting it on line for anyone to download for free?
For a more serious and thoughtful discussion of these issues, I would recommend Don Tapscott’s book “Wikinomics.”
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
This brilliant book described the difference between federal and decentralized organizations, the benefits and challenges of both, and offered hybrid possibilities to maximize energies in the 21 century.
The book is well written, filled with tales and examples and simple to translate into a variety of organizations.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
Ori and Rod are onto something here. It isn’t new or planet shattering and it is a repeat of a lot of additional thought by Godin and Collins but they place it into a nice metaphor with some practical examples and suggestions. The spider is the federal organization which is run by the head brain and has a trend to hunker down and become more federal when threatened. The Starfish is the decentralized organization that has NO head, when cut it will form two starfish and the organization tends to grow when threatened (witness: Al Qaeda) Examples of Starfish organizations are Skype, Craigslist, YouTube, etc.
A excellent book and a quick read but nothing really new or ground breaking. It has a fantastic metaphor for today’s organizational structures. I give it three out of five stars.
See an outline of this book and additional reviews at [...]
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
I thought the theme matter of the book was timely, vital and accurate. I loved the diligence of the analysis and comparisons of leaderless versus predictable organizations. But, that’s where the book really ends. There’s no real actionable data for leaders to take back to their companies, only the argument of what they are up against.
I want to read a Part 2 to this book that completes the cycle. That is, how modern companies can utilize these patterns to their advantage to grow in the market place. I reflect there are extremely valid applications of this. One example that stands out is Salesforce and AppExchange.
By developing Apex and adding a market (AppExchange) for third party development, Salesforce is expanding its trace and innovating through organizations they may never have previously had a relationship with.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5