{"id":307,"date":"2006-10-23T23:57:34","date_gmt":"2006-10-24T04:57:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/devinreams.com\/2006\/10\/23\/the-starfish-and-the-spider\/"},"modified":"2006-10-23T23:57:34","modified_gmt":"2006-10-24T04:57:34","slug":"the-starfish-and-the-spider","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/?p=307","title":{"rendered":"The Starfish and the Spider"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So far I&#8217;m doing a horrible job of maintaining my &#8216;read a book each month&#8217; resolution. So, in my attempt to catch up I recently started acquiring a bunch of books. The first being <a href=\"http:\/\/www.starfishandspider.com\/\">The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations<\/a> by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Starfish-Spider-Unstoppable-Leaderless-Organizations\/dp\/1591841437\">Amazon<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/devinreams.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2006\/10\/starfish.png\"\/><\/p>\n<p>As others have mentioned, this book is kinda like a new &#8216;The Tipping Point&#8217; 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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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<\/p>\n<p><em>Note: I decided that I want to track my book reviews so I took the <a href=\"http:\/\/paulgoscicki.com\/projects\/wp-movie-ratings\/\">movie rating plugin<\/a> found on the bottom site and created a a <a href=\"http:\/\/devinreams.com\/tools\/wp-book-reviews\/\">book review plugin<\/a>. You can find it on my <a href=\"http:\/\/devinreams.com\/tools\/\">Tools<\/a> page.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So far I&#8217;m doing a horrible job of maintaining my &#8216;read a book each month&#8217; 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[83,586],"class_list":["post-307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet","tag-reading","tag-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}