The Starfish and the Spider
Ori Brafman and Rod A Beckstrom
Penguin
Spiders are amongst the oldest creatures on earth. But the future belongs to the starfish. The starfish has the unique capacity of regenerating itself—lop off a starfish's limb and it grows a new one, which in turn grows into an entirely new starfish. But maim a spider's legs and it remains permanently crippled. Unlike the spider, the starfish is capable of infinite rebirth.
This is the startling metaphor that the authors of this book use to illustrate the future of business enterprise. The key to success is decentralisation and an 'amorphous distribution of roles', exemplified by the starfish. The rigid hierarchical system with CEOs and the traditional chain of command, embodied by the spider, may well be doomed to extinction if traditional companies do not hybridize and adopt some of the elements of starfish (dis)organisation
Brafman and Beckstrom, both American entrepreneurs, draw on some vivid connections to present their case on 'the unstoppable power of leaderless organisations'. When recording and movie giants like MGM, Columbia, Disney, Sony, Capitol Records and others found their revenues falling by 25 per cent through piracy, they hired the best legal firms to crush hackers like Grokster and Napster.
They won the initial legal battles but eventually lost the war. Companies like Napster were promptly replaced by a new programme called Kaza, whose 'owner' simply fled to the South Pacific island of Vanuata—beyond the reach of the American legal system. Kaza meanwhile spawned Kaza Light, devised by an anonymous hacker.
A similar company eDonkey mutated into eMule whose operators were even more elusive than their predecessors. What was piracy to the big companies was swapping and sharing of music and movies by millions of Internet users happily downloading them in homes across the globe. And it was all free.
Another revealing story is Skype which took on telecom giants AT&T by making available through the net free phone calls around the world. Yet another venture Craiglist, an online free classified ads site, has created huge dents in the revenues of newspapers in the United States. The site now attracts three billion page views a month in 175 cities around the world.
Similarly, Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia may well replace the Encyclopaedia Brittanica. It is now available in 200 languages, with more than a million articles on various subjects in the English language section alone. It has taken the dissemination of disinterested knowledge to new heights with users themselves controlling the editorial functions, with individual, anonymous contributions on a particular subject being updated and refined by other experts in the same field.
All these successful organisations are imbued with the qualities of the starfish system—they are all decentralised, have no visible leader, headquarters or a rigid chain of command, and are based on trust. The Internet has provided them a level playing field and unprecedented freedom and flexibility.
In its depth and range, The Starfish and the Spider may not be quite in the same league as Freakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner. But it is an engaging read, full of surprising insights both for the net-nerd and the net-challenged.
Manohar Shetty.
Ori Brafman and Rod A Beckstrom
Penguin
Spiders are amongst the oldest creatures on earth. But the future belongs to the starfish. The starfish has the unique capacity of regenerating itself—lop off a starfish's limb and it grows a new one, which in turn grows into an entirely new starfish. But maim a spider's legs and it remains permanently crippled. Unlike the spider, the starfish is capable of infinite rebirth.
This is the startling metaphor that the authors of this book use to illustrate the future of business enterprise. The key to success is decentralisation and an 'amorphous distribution of roles', exemplified by the starfish. The rigid hierarchical system with CEOs and the traditional chain of command, embodied by the spider, may well be doomed to extinction if traditional companies do not hybridize and adopt some of the elements of starfish (dis)organisation
Brafman and Beckstrom, both American entrepreneurs, draw on some vivid connections to present their case on 'the unstoppable power of leaderless organisations'. When recording and movie giants like MGM, Columbia, Disney, Sony, Capitol Records and others found their revenues falling by 25 per cent through piracy, they hired the best legal firms to crush hackers like Grokster and Napster.
They won the initial legal battles but eventually lost the war. Companies like Napster were promptly replaced by a new programme called Kaza, whose 'owner' simply fled to the South Pacific island of Vanuata—beyond the reach of the American legal system. Kaza meanwhile spawned Kaza Light, devised by an anonymous hacker.
A similar company eDonkey mutated into eMule whose operators were even more elusive than their predecessors. What was piracy to the big companies was swapping and sharing of music and movies by millions of Internet users happily downloading them in homes across the globe. And it was all free.
Another revealing story is Skype which took on telecom giants AT&T by making available through the net free phone calls around the world. Yet another venture Craiglist, an online free classified ads site, has created huge dents in the revenues of newspapers in the United States. The site now attracts three billion page views a month in 175 cities around the world.
Similarly, Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia may well replace the Encyclopaedia Brittanica. It is now available in 200 languages, with more than a million articles on various subjects in the English language section alone. It has taken the dissemination of disinterested knowledge to new heights with users themselves controlling the editorial functions, with individual, anonymous contributions on a particular subject being updated and refined by other experts in the same field.
All these successful organisations are imbued with the qualities of the starfish system—they are all decentralised, have no visible leader, headquarters or a rigid chain of command, and are based on trust. The Internet has provided them a level playing field and unprecedented freedom and flexibility.
In its depth and range, The Starfish and the Spider may not be quite in the same league as Freakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner. But it is an engaging read, full of surprising insights both for the net-nerd and the net-challenged.
Manohar Shetty.