The Starfish & The Spider

This is the title of Ori Brafman & Rod Beckstrom’s recent book. I was enthused reading about a centralized and a decentralized management system.What I enjoyed most was the characteristic of a catalyst!

I include herewith a brief summary of the book which should wet your appetite to reading the book.The path line and experiences of both authors is very interesting too.
A spider is a creature with eight legs coming out of a central body. It
has a tiny head and usually eight eyes. If you chop off the spider’s head, it
dies. That’s exactly what happens with a centralized organization. A centralized
organization has a clear leader who’s in charge, and there’s a specific
place where decisions are made. Get rid of the leader and you paralyze
the organization.
A decentralized organization is a different animal –– it is actually a
starfish. At first glance, a starfish is similar to a spider in appearance. But
the starfish is decentralized. The starfish doesn’t have a head. The major
organs are replicated throughout each and every arm. In reality, a starfish
is a neural network –– basically a network of cells. Instead of having a
head, like a spider, the starfish functions as a decentralized network.
In The Starfish and the Spider, Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom
address the fundamental differences between the starfish organization and
the spider organization. They demonstrate with examples why starfish organizations
are sometimes confused with spiders, how difficult it is to attack
or destroy a starfish organization and why a smart business model for the
future is a hybrid organization –– part starfish, part spider.
In addition, this summary will address:
✓ The right questions to ask when distinguishing a starfish organization
from a spider organization.
✓ The rise of successful starfish organizations, such as Skype, craigslist
and Wikipedia.
✓ The importance of circles, catalysts and ideology to the starfish
organization.
✓ The key differences between catalysts and CEOs.
✓ Specific strategies to defeat starfish organizations.
✓ Rules for living in the new world of decentralization.

Entrepreneurs might look up to take on board this type of management, which is very much in the line of today’s development network style. Wiki! Ebay!Apache!Neural networks!