Stuffopolis

The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations

Reviewer: Bijoy

Rating: 8.0/10

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This book is written in the mode of Tipping Point, Blink, Freakonomics, Wisdom of Crowds. That works for some of us (Evangeslits and Relaters!) and not for others (Mavens). Still, the book is a great read and is highly relevant to Bootstrap as we are a "Starfish" rather than a "Spider."

There's also a very nice mapping of the "Champion" role in the Starfish to the "Evangelist" in The Human Fabric as well as the "Catalyst" to the Maven and Relater.

There are some challenges with the book - no distinction betweeen starfish organizational structure vs user-structure, the claim that Starfishes are "leaderless" in the traditional sense,

It's great that someone's given a name to organizations like Bootstrap and I'm looking forward to having us be covered in the second edition! I'm also looking forwad to having a discussion about this, as it relatest to our emerging discussion of Bootstrap as Open Source.

It also does seem that bootstrappers are natural Starfish because of the efficient organazational structure and low overhead of that structure.

bijoy

Date Reviewed: October 9, 2006