EclecticLip

Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom’s The Starfish and the Spider was the ninth book club selection.  It was selected based on a desire to learn about decentralized team structures.  A positive review on military analyst John Robb’s blog Global Guerrillas, also helped.

As of June 2010, it has proven to be one of the most cross-referenced texts in subsequent book summaries and discussion.

As always, if you consider the review useful, please consider supporting the authors by purchasing the book. 

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The Starfish and the Spider - summary

(Originally written May 25 — posted July 9) 

One of the earlier book club selections, The Starfish and the Spider, discussed the contrast between centralized and decentralized groups.  One of the major points was that centralized groups are rarely able to overwhelm decentralized opponents, as exemplified by the entertainment industry’s innumerable failed attempts to shut down peer-to-peer file-sharing, or the fact that guerrilla groups give military opponents so much trouble.  A recent story in Australian paper The Age, shows another example, this time how WikiLeaks gives governments headaches.

WikiLeaks is essentially a guerrilla publisher; they make it possible for insiders to leak sensitive information, anonymously.  As per the article, “[the] fact that the website has no headquarters, also means the conventional retaliatory measures - phones tapped, a raid by the authorities - are impossible.”

As an extraordinarily decentralized organization, WikiLeaks would therefore qualify as a “starfish”.

(originally written March 17.  Posted March 28) 

The recent issue of TIME magazine included a scribbling by someone named Reihan Salam.  His article “The Dropout Economy” is somewhat sensationalistic and largely unnoteworthy, except for the fact that it directly references the writings of a guy named John Robb, whose ideas on “resilient communities” were footnoted in the article I co-wrote for McKinsey last year, on the future of energy.

Which means that my company’s thought leadership is a full year ahead of the curve of TIME magazine’s ever-shrinking readership.  And based on a quick search of The Economist’s website, they haven’t even heard of the term. 

Robb — a former US Air Force guy who helped mainstream RSS feeds — posits that due to a confluence of factors (financial, demographic, technological) the nation-state is going to be under tremendous pressure in the coming decades.  As a result, communities will reorient themselves to resiliency as opposed to efficiency.  (His blog is here.)

This might be best understood through analogies:

- Redmond’s Technosaurus Rex beat out its corporate competition in the PC era.  But its dominance has eroded in the face of competition from decentralized, ad hoc open-source code.  (Linux, Firefox, OpenOffice and others)

- humans are the dominant animals: with our tools, we can overcome any creature we run into in sky, street or sea.  But we don’t look so kingly compared to bacteria: they can develop immunity to our antibiotics faster than we can invent new ones

- the US is the world’s hyperpower: it can overwhelm all its rival nation-states.  But like all countries, it’s struggling to deal with threats from terrorist cells, which can be small enough to “fly under the radar” of the traditional defense mechanisms (police, armed forces)

In the past half-century at least, there’s been a strong advantage for communities and countries to be organized on the basis of efficiency, at the expense of resiliency.  As such, our world is one of faraway power plants and overseas supply chains.  Like Robb, I think the pendulum is swinging (for at least a couple decades) towards resiliency; it will be seen as advantageous enough, even if it seems more expensive than efficiency.  And *that* creates the kind of opening that fuel cells and other on-site power generation technologies can richly exploit. :)

Late last year, one of the executives asked me to help write a paper on the future of energy.

McKinsey & Company have now published it. 

Other authors in the series include:

• Nobel Laureate and US Energy Secretary Steven Chu (“Time to fix the wiring”)
• Intel co-founder Andy Grove (“An electric plan for energy resilience”)
• peak oil titan Colin Campbell (“The end of the oil age”)

Cooler still, as this unPhotoshopped screengrab shows, we’ve got the top spot in the Energy section!!  (For now.)

Even cooler still, McKinsey had originally intended to circulate the essay collection at the World Economic Forum at Davos.  (Ultimately they published a subset, and ours didn’t make the cut.)  So I came within an editor’s whim of being able to put “…his work has been circulated at the World Economic Forum at Davos…” on my resume!

A long-form version of the essay will be made publicly available soon; I’ll link to that in due course.

Meanwhile, I think I’ll take a few more days off blogging to bask in the quietly ecstatic glow. 

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(click to enlarge)

Yes, that’s an attempt at a pun.

In the past twenty-odd years, Microsoft has proven exceedingly good at dispatching business rivals.  They’ve been unstoppable spider-killers.

Even Google’s search dominance is a limited direct threat — Google has captured a new market, they aren’t “eating Microsoft’s lunch”. And open-source alternatives (Linux, OpenOffice) have been the business equivalent of blackflies, as opposed to, say, Viking raiders.
Until now.

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In the past few decades, GM has sunk while Toyota has soared.  I suspect a big part of this is that GM extended division of labour too far.  The principle of division of labour went from being a strength, to a crippling strength.
Specifically, by dividing “manufacturing” from “improving manufacturing” and assigning specialists to each (line workers and engineers, respectively) GM dammed up the supply of cost-cutting solutions.  The people with the most expertise couldn’t contribute.
In contrast, Toyota kept “manufacturing” and “improving manufacturing” together — and so benefited (and continues to benefit) from a torrent of ideas for improvement.

Pericles made an analogous point in his Funeral Oration during the Peloponnesian War, describing why Athens would beat Sparta: words to the effect that “Sparta has one leader but we have thousands”, in reference to Athens’ democracy.

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Apparently, the images-with-distorted-text used to prevent automated e-mail signup, are being used to manually digitise sections of text archives which OCR (optical character recognition) technology can’t use.
That’s the premise behind reCaptcha, the follow-on to Captcha (which — being “Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computer and Humans Apart” — initials out to Capttttcha).

This is very, very cool — it makes the anti-spam login step bifunctional: in addition to fulfilling the intended purpose, a valuable side benefit is also provided.
Like Skype or file-sharing, it leverages an existing infrastructure.  But instead of data transmission infrastructure or computer memory, reCaptcha capitalizes on the “gatekeeping service” crucial to innumerable websites.

Very cool, and worthy of being my first polyfunctionality tag!