Friday, April 27, 2007 9:39 AM
If you are looking for a book to add to your 'to-read' list, you might consider The Starfish and The Spider. It has been out for some time now and you have read something about it in the press. I am most of the way through it myself and finding it well worth the time.
Here is a snippet from the dust jacket:
If you cut off a spider’s head, it dies; if you cut off a starfish’s leg it grows a new one, and that leg can grow into an entirely new starfish. Traditional top-down organizations are like spiders, but now starfish organizations are changing the face of business and the world.
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? After five years of ground-breaking research Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom have discovered 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 book's authors suggest the working title for the book was the "The Decentralized Revolution" and from my own reading of Starfish, I think they were dead-on.
The authors begin by looking at the music industry, and the impact peer-to-peer file-sharing technologies have had on the sale of music. While the music industry was able to seek legal remedies against companies, like Napster, which utilized a centralized 'hub' as part of the file-sharing process, countless other file-sharing programs soon launched which not only did not have a corporate sponsor parent, but which worked in true peer-to-peer fashion. It has become increasingly difficult to stop these programs, as they continue to morph and spread across the world. And, mostly not for any commercial gain or purpose.
We all might think that our future competition will be other commercial enterprises, but for some businesses and industries, that simply may not be true. Some industries, like the music industry and digital music, may well find that their biggest competitor may be thousands of individuals providing the same or similar services for free. And, even when the competition is another commercial enterprise, that enterprise may be a couple of people in India, Australia, China or Iowa, targeting a specific niche and making it financially viable for their small business.
In legal, knowledge and information have significant financial value. Thus, as I tend to think about how knowledge and information related to the legal world is being created, compiled and disseminated, I likewise wonder about the whys and hows of strategic thinking at the big knowledge and information providers serving legal? How will these businesses and professionals protect their business models against new competitors that may nibble and pick at pieces of their businesses, perhaps providing the same or similar knowledge and information at a significantly lower cost (or free)? Sure, huge information-based companies like Google have barely even looked at legal to this point, but with the cost of increasingly powerful technologies dropping exponentially, it may be the hundreds of little players that, in sum, ultimately provide the biggest competitive challenge.
What is to stop a few lawyers, law librarians or other visionaries from tackling a legal niche about which they have deep knowledge and lots of information? And, then organizing and disseminating that knowledge and information in a way that is commercially viable? Or just giving it away as a service to the larger legal community? Or perhaps hundreds of legal entrepreneurs set up shop in India, hiring (very low cost) lawyers there to write case summaries to dump into databases made available worldwide at a fraction of today's costs. To me, the above possibilities have always been there in theory. In practice, the technology required to turn these ideas into viable businesses has been too complicated and too expensive for small enterprises. But, these barriers are rapidly disappearing.
Starfish organizations are taking society and the business world by storm, and are changing the rules of strategy and competition. Like starfish in the sea, starfish organizations are organized on very different principles than we are used to seeing in traditional organizations. Spider organizations are centralized and have clear organs and structure. You know who is in charge. You see them coming.
Starfish organizations, on the other hand, are based on completely different principles. They tend to organize around a shared ideology or a simple platform for communicaton- around ideologies like al Qaeda or Alcoholics Anonymous. They arise rapidly around the simplest ideas or platforms. Ideas or platforms that can be easily duplicated. Once they arrive they can be massively disruptive and are here to stay, for good or bad. And the Internet can help them flourish.
So in today’s world starfish are starting to gain the upper hand.
Ultimately, while you agree with the authors above-noted contentions or not, they are worth considering.
I have been astounded at how quickly my local newspaper has become a shadow of its former self. I likewise look at old line companies with huge, "protected," marketshares, like Kodak, quickly fall apart as a result of miscalculating how fast the transformation would occur. In both cases, I believe that these businesses spent too long waiting for something to happen instead of proactively reinventing themselves.
In times of great change and transformation, proactive thinking and planning seems to be a better course of action than sitting back in a reactive mode. As I believe the The Starfish and The Spider points out, the decentralized revolution may be here sooner than any of us realize. And, nobody wants to be left behind...