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Summary
Summary
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. Some organisations are as decentralised as the starfish, with no control or grand strategy, such as Craigslist and Napster who both were originally run by their customers. This new book proves that this type of leadership is primed to take over the world. Major companies are starting to decentralise with great results. This is a guide to the theory behind decentralisation.
Author Notes
Ori Brafman is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author. Born in Israel, and raised in El Paso, Texas, he has been an entrepreneur most of his life in business, government, and the nonprofit sector. While in college, he co-founded Vegan Action, which helped bring vegan foods into college dining halls and now has a network of over thirty-six national and international chapters. He was also co-founder of Courtroom Connect, a courtroom technology company, and in 2001, he co-founded Global Peace Networks, a network of over 1000 CEOs working on peace and economic development projects.
Brafman has a B.A. in peace and conflict studies from UC Berkeley and an M.B.A. from Stanford University. He is considered an organizational expert and specializes in new ways of looking at business. His first book, The Starfish and the Spider (2006), was translated into 5 languages.
Brafman has appeared on ABC, National Public Radio, Wall Street Journal/MarketWatch video, and CSPAN, and has had speaking engagements at Microsoft, Amazon, Stanford Business School, Harvard Business School, and other organizations.
Reviews (1)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Brafman and Beckstrom, a pair of Stanford M.B.A.s who have applied their business know-how to promoting peace and economic development through decentralized networking, offer 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). The authors also analyze one of today's most worrisome "starfish" organizations-al-Qaeda-though that group undermines the authors' point that the power of leaderless groups helps to demonstrate the essential goodness and trustworthiness of human beings. (Oct. 5) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Table of Contents
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| 1 MGM's Mistake and the Apache Mystery | p. 9 |
| 2 The Spider, the Starfish, and the President of the Interent | p. 29 |
| 3 A Sea of Starfish | p. 57 |
| 4 Standing on Five Legs | p. 83 |
| 5 The Hidden Power of the Catalyst | p. 107 |
| 6 Taking on Decentralization | p. 133 |
| 7 The Combo Special: The Hybrid Organization | p. 159 |
| 8 In Search of the Sweet Spot | p. 179 |
| 9 The New World | p. 197 |
| Epilogue | p. 209 |
| Sources | p. 215 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 222 |
| Index | p. 225 |
