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Book Review: The Starfish and the Spider

By January 2, 2009March 4th, 2019Announcements

I wanted to update the community on an interesting book I read over the holiday period that may be of interest to you; as an open source community member. The Starfish and the Spider – the Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom. I received a recommendation to read this book during a recent trip and finally had some time over the holidays to do some reading.
The book discusses how decentralized organizations are able to not only compete but also thrive in our current Internet based culture. Using common examples that many of us are familiar with such as eBay, Skype, and Wikipedia the authors are able to easily demonstrate how these oragnizational structures are quickly chaning long standing industries. The book is a faily quick read and while not going into too much depth, does offer enough quaility points to make you think about the concepts. As an added benefit to those of us with MBAs, there is even a chapter focused on Peter Drucker, the MBA guru himself.
I recommend everyone in the community take some time to read this book as I believe it speaks clearly to us open sourcers…