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

Book written by RodBeckstrom and Ori Brafman, ISBN:1591841437

Description:

"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."

This book is relevant to wikis deployed at the workplace: Wikis tend change the work culture from a top down spider org to a more flat/democratic starfish organization.

Links:

• ISBN:1591841437 - ISBN
• http://www.starfishandspider.com/ - official home

-- Contributors: PeterThoeny - 31 Oct 2007

Discussion

TWikiMeetUpInBerlin has info on TWiki Meetup at Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin on 2007-11-07.

-- PeterThoeny & RodBeckstrom - 31 Oct 2007

Started to read the book and wonder if TWiki isn't to much of a spider system. I think that at least the store should somehow be more distributed. Maybe by a GitStore or something. What do you think? Does anybody know of a 'distributed' Wiki based on some P2P technology (like eMule)?

-- FranzJosefGigler - 16 Apr 2008

For TWiki, you may want to look at TimJanssens efforts: MercurialContrib and RcsSyncAddOn. For other wikis, there are some experiments: such as Wooki, and there is a small list on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer_wiki

-- ColasNahaboo - 17 Apr 2008

The TWiki engine might be a spider configuration, bu the main point is that the use of TWiki is very much starfish like.

-- PeterThoeny - 18 Apr 2008

Yes, I agree with Peter - all wikis (inc. TWiki) encourage starfish working.

But, as someone who's read the book, I'd just like to point out that Brafman & Beckstrom don't actually say that everything's got to be a starfish. The key point is to skilfully blend spiders with starfish to ensure that the resultant organisation/system best fulfills its goals. For example, as the authors point out in their book, starfish can often depress profits for the system owners and can make the system more difficult to control.

-- MichaelCorbett - 18 Apr 2008

I think this book and its relation to TWiki isn't so much of value with regards to technical aspects but more of interest for TWiki as an organization and its people, eg. how to convert one kind of organization into another and the goals that where achieved.

-- MichaelDaum - 18 Apr 2008