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
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publisher
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Access-Space.org: Grow Your Own Media Lab (2008)

A comic book by Sheffield’s Access Space.

Text by James Wallbank
Pictures by Michael Tesh
Publisher Access Space, Sheffield, UK, June 2008
Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0 UK License
ISBN 9780955009136
116 pages

Review: Rob Myers (Furtherfield)

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2017-9-25)

Olga Goriunova: Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet (2011)

“In this book, Goriunova offers a critical analysis of the processes that produce digital culture. Digital cultures thrive on creativity, developing new forces of organization to overcome repetition and reach brilliance. In order to understand the processes that produce culture, the author introduces the concept of the art platform, a specific configuration of creative passions, codes, events, individuals and works that are propelled by cultural currents and maintained through digitally native means. Art platforms can occur in numerous contexts bringing about genuinely new cultural production, that, given enough force, come together to sustain an open mechanism while negotiating social, technical and political modes of power.

Software art, digital forms of literature, 8-bit music, 3D art forms, pro-surfers, and networks of geeks are test beds for enquiry into what brings and holds art platforms together. Goriunova provides a new means of understanding the development of cultural forms on the Internet, placing the phenomenon of participatory and social networks in a conceptual and historical perspective, and offering powerful tools for researching cultural phenomena overlooked by other approaches.”

Publisher Routledge, 2011
Volume 35 of Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies
ISBN 0415893100, 9780415893107
228 pages

Reviews: Annet Dekker (OPEN, 2012), Tony Sampson (Mute, 2012), Alessandro Ludovico (Neural, 2012), Hanna Kuusela (Media, Culture & Society, 2013).

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2018-10-23)