I'm halfway thru the book right now and can only say that it's one of the better business books I've read. Of course, I'm a big fan of decentralization so that shouldn't come as a surprise. Once I finish I'll have more thoughts but as a teaser, here's an interview with Tom Peters and Rod Beckstrom, one of the co-authors.
Let's look at the spider first, since we're most familiar with them: body in the middle, four legs on each side, a cute little head on top. If we cut off the leg of an adult spider, we usually get a crippled, seven-legged spider. On the other hand, if we cut off the head of a spider, it dies. The reason it dies is that it has a centralized physiology, and it cannot live without its central nervous system. It has a command-and-control hierarchy within it that's driven by that brain. When I was in business school studying organizations, they had pretty clear organizational structures. There was usually a senior hierarchy: a CEO, chairman, or Board of Directors at the top and layers of hierarchy below. We've been looking at businesses as spiders, having intelligence like spiders, and being organized and coordinated like spiders. Now let's contrast it with the starfish for a moment. When we see a starfish on the beach, most of them have five legs. Some species actually have up to 50. When we cut a leg off, (or an arm as it's referred to in the starfish), that arm can grow back. What's amazing is that in some species, such as the blue linckia, found on the cover of our book, if you cut off all five legs near the center, each arm can re-grow an entire creature, an entire new starfish. You can actually chop a starfish into five pieces and produce five new starfish. These remarkable powers of regeneration, durability, and resistance to attack are due to the fundamental architecture of the starfish. The starfish is a decentralized organism. It's actually more like a community of five different arms rather than one centralized creature. It does not have a centralized brain; it has a decentralized neuron-network. It does not have a centralized stomach; the slit under each arm of a starfish is the stomach within each arm. Each arm has the critical organs required for survival.
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Posted by Josh at February 27, 2007 05:53 AM