The starfish and the spider
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.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
8mentions
8people
2007–2020years
38% recommend63% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Hey William. I also think one of the big mistakes is that Eric trademarked Lean Startup. Check out the book, Starfish and the Spider. The way to kill a grassroots movement is to centralize the power and then it dies with the center.
- That sounds like a tautology along the lines of Creationist thinking (this is so well-designed, it must have a designer…)
If there are more powerful superiors, then wouldn't the same argument apply? They must be powerful because they have superiors, etc. etc. ad absurdem…
My point wasn't that any ONE person (Zuck or anyone) is all powerful or influential. The point is that SOLIDARITY i.e. ORGANIZATION itself confers power on the organization.
Organized power might be distributed where no one person can dictate the organization's direction. Or it might have an all-powerful-dictator. Either way, organizing confers power to the organized entity.
Corporations are powerful, even though they are constrained in various ways and the power is wielded by a mix of actors within the corporation.
Consumers / citizens who each act unilaterally have less power even though their aggregate decisions can have powerful effects in the market (because they are disorganized, they can only choose from what the supply side offers, we don't get true demand-driven products).
Organized power doesn't necessarily mean top-down either. See the Starfish and the Spider (book about decentralization). Decentralized entities are more persistent (no single head to cut off to kill them), but decentralized ≠ unorganized.
- I think someone needs to read "The Starfish and the Spider"
- Please let me know if I'm missing an important book.
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- I'm reading "The Starfish and the Spider" right now, though I'm early into the book, this system fascinates me. I find the illiteracy which both videos touched on equally fascinating as the system evolved around the workers' abilities rather than finding workers able to fit the system.
- Very interesting! This reminded me of the book "The Starfish and the Spider" where it discusses the power of leaderless organizations and how they can be better in certain instances.
Something interesting from the book is that these centralized groups become more and more centralized when they are attacked but the decentralized groups become more and more decentralized.
An example would be the RIAA vs Napster. Napster was replaced by more and more decentralized networks while the RIAA started asserting more and more control.
