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10/17/2006: "“Metaphors Are Only As Good As Their Interpreters,” Said the Spider to the Starfish Just Before He Flung Him Into the Fire"

I’d love to say something positive about the just released The Starfish and the Spider, and so I will before I forget that I intended to. The book is a fun little read if you’d like to revisit the oft-told, winsome startup stories of techno-age successes like eBay and Wikipedia and Skype. I like the authors’ metaphors, too. If you cut off a spider’s head, it dies; ditto, or so argue the two Stanford MBAs who wrote the book, with highly centralized organizations. But if you severe the leg of a starfish, the leg can grow into an entirely new starfish. Ditto, the authors argue, for decentralized organizations like, well, Alcoholics Anonymous, Napster, al Qaeda and, again, Wikipedia.

How neat. But then that’s the problem repeatedly with Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom’s book. Any resemblance between their portrayals and analyses of the things and the real world can disappear neatly in the middle of a paragraph. That happens, for example, on p. 39, when they seek to excuse the epically egregious failure of the United States government to respond when Katrinia flooded New Orleans by noting that “the real culprit … was the system itself. It’s times like these that you need a starfish.” Brafman and Beckstrom breezily ignore the reality that FEMA was much more like a starfish before the Bush Administration turned it into something much more like a spider.

But the example that really puts Brafman’s and Beckstrom’s effort to say profound things with Danielle Steel glibness down the toilet is their breathless retelling of the tragic conflict between the invading Spaniards and the indigenous Apaches. Cortés’ spider-like invaders utterly destroyed the equally spider-like Aztecs, but not so, say the authors, the starfish-like Apaches. The Apaches, they note, held off the Spaniards for two centuries. And there they leave the story abruptly in their hurry to compare Napster and Kazaa to the Apaches and the music industry to the Spaniards, or Skype to starfish and the phone companies to spiders.

In many of the us-versus-them episodes that Brafman and Beckstrom recount, I don’t really have a dog in the hunt myself. And I suspect I’ll not be the only reader who can easily find good reasons to be first on the side of the spiders and then the side of the starfish. But the reason this isn’t a worthwhile, believable book for understanding the complexities of a global marketplace and postpostCold-War age is that it’s ridiculously selective in choosing its facts and mounting its interpretations.

Let me let far more impassioned readers than am I make the case. The book’s claim that al Qaeda's success is attributable to its starfish characteristics immediately set off a minor firestorm on the blogs of a Web site called military.com. A reader who signs on as Ironfang observed:

"Why did the Apaches finally lose after 200 years of independence? Because they were decimated, bottom line. The US used some pretty heavy handed tactics. The choice for Native Americans were ‘Reservation or Genocide’. Japanese fanaticism (remember, the original suicide bombers) was cured by the Atomic Bomb. There are few instances throughout history where ideology has been defeated by diplomacy (at least not that I know of, examples would be welcomed). How do you kill a starfish? You throw the complete starfish into a pit of fire.”

You don’t have to approve of Ironfang’s solutions to sense that in only a couple of sentences his analysis gets hugely beyond anything the authors of The Starfish and the Spider have to offer.

I don’t know whether this book will spin its way to the top of the bestseller lists; the whole project walks like a duck and talks like a duck and smells like a duck if your definition of a duck is a “made-on-Madison-Avenue pseudoevent”; as this is written, The Starfish and the Spider (released on Oct. 9) was No. 2,109 on Amazon.com’s sales ranking. But I don’t think it will be translated into Arabic and find its way into al Qaeda’s backpacks to be read alongside their bomb-making manuals. And, frankly, there’s nothing here that is going to be helpful to any CEO, manager or wannabe entrepreneur looking for wisdom on how to organize in the chaos of today’s business or geopolitical worlds. That’s because the reality level, if not the reading level, of The Starfish and the Spider is at about the junior high level.

Editor’s Note: I received not one, but two, pre-release copies of this book because the authors’ publicist is a Brain Technologies associate. As you can see, I’m going to be in deep doodoo with her.

The book can be purchased here: The Starfish and the Spider

Articles by Ori Brafman are here: Starfish Change the Rules of War and The 'starfish model' for the war on terrorism: How to counter a decentralized foe

For the discussion on military.com, go here: Discussion boards