The Starfish and the Spider

So far I’m doing a horrible job of maintaining my ‘read a book each month’ resolution. So, in my attempt to catch up I recently started acquiring a bunch of books. The first being The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom (Amazon).

As others have mentioned, this book is kinda like a new ‘The Tipping Point’ in the sense that it looks at these societal phenomena and tries to simplify them. The book does that with two very clever metaphors: the starfish and the spider. A starfish is a creature that is decentralized. Cut off a leg and it grows back (and the leg becomes a new organism). If you cut off the head of a spider, though, it dies.

Some of the most successful groups have been decentralized. Alcoholics Anonymous, Wikipedia, even eBay has an element of decentralization to it. The point is, there are a lot of groups that require a certain level of decentralization; they need to find the sweet spot.

I enjoyed this book because it looked at a lot of cool subjects (from abolitionism to craigslist) and analyzed this underlying reason for their widespread success. I enjoyed it so much I took it to the gym for two days and finished the 200 pages in record time. I highly recommend this book to anyone and everyone because it takes very detailed observations and makes them easy to understand. 10/10

Note: I decided that I want to track my book reviews so I took the movie rating plugin found on the bottom site and created a a book review plugin. You can find it on my Tools page.

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About Devin Reams

My name is Devin Reams and I founded this site to provide a useful news and review resource for Colorado skiers and snowboarders (and mountain enthusiasts). I've been skiing since I was a little kid (we moved out here when I was five years old) and I plan to ski for years beyond that. Although cosnow is not my full-time job it is my full-time winter hobby. I've been an "Epic Local" passholder since 2006 (when it was called a "Colorado Pass" or "Five Mountain Pass"). My favorite resorts are Beaver Creek and Breckenridge.

4 thoughts on “The Starfish and the Spider

  1. Emma

    Why all the inspirational books, Devin? My dad does that too… there’s one about throwing fish at some market in Seattle or something, and one about… I think it’s cheese? Who took my cheese, something to that effect? Haha, and Never Eat Alone… OH WAIT, that’s you and Branden. How about a nice novel?

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  2. Emma

    Haha I would counter that books about leadership are for wussies, Devin. Then again I probably shouldn’t talk since I’m currently in the process of knitting yet another scarf…

    Hrmn.

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  3. Pingback: Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior

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