Ori Brafman, Rod A. Beckstrom: The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations (2006)

Understanding the amazing force that links some of today’s most successful companies

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.

The Starfish and the Spider explores what happens when starfish take on spiders (such as the music industry vs. Napster, Kazaa, and the P2P services that followed). It reveals how established companies and institutions, from IBM to Intuit to the US government, are also learning how to incorporate starfish principles to achieve success. The book explores:

* How the Apaches fended off the powerful Spanish army for 200 years
* The power of a simple circle
* The importance of catalysts who have an uncanny ability to bring people together
* How the Internet has become a breeding ground for leaderless organizations
* How Alcoholics Anonymous has reached untold millions with only a shared ideology and without a leader

The Starfish and the Spider is the rare book that will change how you understand the world around you.

Publisher Penguin, 2006
ISBN 1591841437, 9781591841432
230 pages

authors
wikipedia
publisher
google books

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Bernard Girard: The Google Way: How One Company Is Revolutionizing Management as We Know It (2009)

Shortly after World War I, Ford and GM created the large modern corporation, with its financial and statistical controls, mass production, and assembly lines. In the 1980s, Toyota stood out for combining quality with continuous refinement. Today, Google is reinventing business yet again—the way we work, how organizations are controlled, and how employees are managed.

Management consultant Bernard Girard has been analyzing Google since its founding in 1998, and now in The Google Way, he explores Google’s innovations in depth—many of which are far removed from the best practices taught at the top business schools.

As you read, you’ll see how much of Google’s success is due to its focus on users and automation. You’ll also learn how eCommerce has profoundly changed the relationship between businesses and their customers, for the first time giving customers an important role to play in a major corporation’s growth. Finally, Girard speculates about the limits of Google’s business model and discusses the challenges it will face as it continues to grow.

Publisher No Starch Press, 2009
ISBN 1593271840, 9781593271848
Length 247 pages

publisher
google books

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Luc Boltanski, Eve Chiapello: The New Spirit of Capitalism (1999–) [EN, RU]

“A century after the publication of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism a major new work examines network-based organization, employee autonomy and post-Fordist horizontal work structures.

Why is the critique of capitalism so ineffective today? In this major work, the sociologists Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski suggest that we should be addressing the crisis of anticapitalist critique by exploring its very roots.

Via an unprecedented analysis of management texts which influenced the thinking of employers and contributed to reorganization of companies over the last decades, the authors trace the contours of a new spirit of capitalism. From the middle of the 1970s onwards, capitalism abandoned the hierarchical Fordist work structure and developed a new network-based form of organization which was founded on employee initiative and relative work autonomy, but at the cost of material and psychological security.

This new spirit of capitalism triumphed thanks to a remarkable recuperation of the “artistic critique”— that which, after May 1968, attacked the alienation of everyday life by capitalism and bureaucracy. At the same time, the “social critique” was disarmed by the appearance of neocapitalism and remained fixated on the old schemas of hierarchical production.

This book, remarkable for its scope and ambition, seeks to lay the basis for a revival of these two complementary critiques.”

First published in French in 1999.

English edition
Publisher Verso, 2005
Translated by Gregory Elliott
ISBN 1859845541, 9781859845547
601 pages

Publisher

The New Spirit of Capitalism (English, trans. Gregory Elliott, 2005, updated on 2012-11-4)
Novyy dukh kapitalizma (Russian, trans. S. Fokin, 2011, added on 2017-6-18)