Book Review - The Starfish and the Spider

The Starfish and the Spider - The unstoppable power of leaderless organization.

If you want to know why facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, eBay, Google, torrents, Napster, Kazaa etc have succeeded this book is a must read. The interesting thing is that all these organizations have worked more as a starfish (everyone contributes model) than a spider (top management driven). Although not all these organizations have given 100% powers to the users, they have allowed users to contribute and help them to expand in a controlled manner.

In authors words – “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.”

The authors – Ori Brafman and Rod A Beckstrom have done a remarkable work by studying and comparing several organizations like Toyata, General Electric, eBay, MGM, etc.

The interesting thing I observed was each of the new successful organization say Facebook is more like a starfish that the other organizations that it overtook.

Me now thinking of something that could be more resemble a starfish than a Facebook.