The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations
Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom
[Portfolio Trade, 240 pages]
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 U.S. 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
Even if you are not interested in the business world, this book grabs you from the opening line, “It’s like a game of Where’s Waldo. But instead of kids playing the game, the players were the world’s leading neuroscientists.”
The Starfish and the Spider is about the power of individuals coalescing in groups of common interest and goals. It is about people doing things because they are important and meaningful to them. And how, under these circumstances, hierarchical control just isn’t necessary.
Its concepts are based on the communal or tribal system of trust and collaboration and great emphasis is placed on man’s natural “goodness”—although the piece on Al Qaeda shows the opposite—building communities of like-minded individuals, collectively monitoring and correcting rogue elements to ensure the health of the whole.
Any “spider” organization which has attempted to curb or eliminate a “starfish” has had the exact opposite result. The “starfish,” driven underground, simply splinters even more, becomes more elusive, creating an even more powerful and virtually impossible to divide and conquer network of determined individuals whose “Values Are the Organization.”
It is a well-researched, wonderfully-written book, not just for business leaders, but for anyone wishing to become involved in local or global communities. I couldn’t put it down.
