Book: The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations

The authors Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom sent me a copy of their book The Starfish and the Spider (thanks to introductions from Ramit Sethi). I’ve been very busy over the last few months, been travelling, and now changing jobs.

It’s about letting go to gain more, it’s about democritization and socialization, where the knowledge and wisdom using web tools can bring collective decisions.

If you notice the trend, this ties in closely with what business bloggers, social media types, and community marketing folks realize and practice. The power is in the network, with the participants. The more control you give up, the more you can gain.

I’ve started to really dive into the book over the last few days. Here’s the summary from Amazon, if you wanted to get your own copy.

“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.”

In the spirit of bottom up control, their website uses a wiki, such as this “About the Book” section, which let’s anyone contribute. Way to live the lessons Ori and Rod.

Anyone else out there reading this book?

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 19th, 2006 at 6:56 pm and is filed under Community Marketing, Web Strategy, Web Theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.