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    The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations
    The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations
    The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations
    Audiobook5 hours

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

    Written by Rod A. Beckstrom and Ori Brafman

    Narrated by Sean Pratt

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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. This audiobook 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 that rare book that will change how you understand the world around you.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAscent Audio
    Release dateAug 8, 2011
    ISBN9781596599130
    The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations

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    Reviews for The Starfish and the Spider

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      At first I worried that this book was going to be too simplistic because it seemed to be laying out a stark binary between centralized and decentralized organizations. As it turns out, the authors do a great job of nuancing the topic and showing how even centralized organizations can learn from "starfish." Some great observations about the world and wisdom on leadership contained within!
    • 4/5
      Interesting. I’m not sure how to use this information, but in case I become a CEO I’ll try to remember it.
    • 5/5
      An insightful and fascinating look into the difference between structured organizations vs voluntary collectives!
    • 5/5
      An easy and interesting read. The analogy of starfish and spider (decentralized and centralized) business operations is perfect. An insightful explanation with good examples.
    • 5/5
      Great, quick read with useful examples of how centralized, command and control organizations can fail by assuming that engagement with distributed (or "cloud-based") entities can follow the same rules as engagement with other command and control organizations. I have cited this book frequently in recent presentations.
    • 3/5
      This is a breezy and entertaining look at how decentralization is changing many organizations. The title metaphor conveys the core concept: though a starfish and a spider have similar shapes, their internal structure is dramatically different-a decapitated spider inevitably dies, while a starfish can regenerate itself from a single amputated leg. In the same way, decentralized organizations, like the Internet, the Apache Indian tribe and Alcoholics Anonymous, are made up of many smaller units capable of operating, growing and multiplying independently of each other, making it very difficult for a rival force to control or defeat them. Despite familiar examples-eBay, Napster and the Toyota assembly line, for example-there are fresh insights, such as the authors' three techniques for combating a decentralized competitor (drive change in your competitors' ideology, force them to become centralized or decentralize yourself).
    • 5/5
      A really interesting read on organizational structure and leadership. Traditional organizations are often hierarchical and authoritarian. Like spiders, if you cut off a leg (or department), it's weakened; if you cut off it's head (leader/board), and it's dead. Other organizations, however, resemble a starfish, which reproduce a new leg when one is severed (and in fact the severed leg becomes a new starfish!). These organizations are decentralized. Rather than organized around structural authority, starfish organizations share a common ideology and a common DNA (core values) which reproduce along relational networks and is often the work of a catalyst - a movement maker who gets things started, and then gets out of the way, rejecting any authoritarian role. A lot of interesting examples here. If you're interested in leadership and organizational life, it's a fascinating read. My grade: A
    • 4/5
      A thoroughly enjoyable introduction to decentralized networks versus traditional command-and-control organizations.
    • 5/5
      My name is David Marquet, from Practicum, Inc and we help our customers achieve organizational success by getting each person to act as a leader.Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom’s book, The Starfish and the Spider, is a compelling description of the strengths and weaknesses of decentralized (the starfish) and centralized (the spider) organizations. Many of the examples of decentralized organizations are recent, such as Craigslist, Napster, Wikipedia, and Skype. They also contrast the decentralized Apaches against the centralized Spanish Army, illustrating that decentralized organizations are not new.The authors explain that we are in the midst of a revolution where the absence of the traditional leadership model results in organizations without hierarchy. Through their examples, they demonstrate that while you’d think chaos and disorder would be the result, these groups can be tremendously effective.The authors find biological evidence that supports this result. MIT scientist Jerry Lettvin conducted an experiment which attempted to locate the unique brain cell that housed a specific memory. He couldn’t find it. Turns out, the brain itself is a decentralized organ. This means that there is no one cell that houses the memory of grandmother. That would be a fragile architecture as injury to that cell would wipe her out of our memory. Instead, the memory of grandmother lives in a rich pattern of cells. This is a more resilient architecture.We like their thesis and telling of the story. It is consistent with our findings. We frequently get asked, if the leader does not lead the people, who does? Our answer is that people lead themselves.In only one area would I describe these decentralized organizations differently than Brafman and Beckstrom and this is a quibble. They claim these are organizations without leaders. We describe these as organizations where everyone is a leader. In any event, they are organizations where there are no followers!
    • 4/5
      An accessible book that provides a good layman's vocabulary for discussing the strengths and weaknesses of both centralized and decentralized organizations. The authors do a good job, also, in identifying the components that make up a successful decentralized, "starfish" organization. Numerous examples in each chapter help to make the ideas concrete and memorable.
    • 4/5
      Easy reading and enjoyable. This page turner brings a very good and new analogy to management, spiders and starfish for centralized and decentralized organizations. The power of decentralization is brought forward with good examples, but I found it a little shallow. You end the book feeling there's so much more to the theme and the book doesn't touch most of it. That said I still recommend reading it.
    • 5/5
      This book totally rocks my world!