A tweet from the esteemed Ken Banks (@kiwanja) made me send off for The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod A Beckstrom, which saw me through a couple of snowy journeys this week. I enjoyed it a lot, not least because it completely confirms me in my views about how organizations and industries work.

The title comes from the contrast between spiders (centralized – cut off its head and it dies) and starfish (decentralized – cut off any bit at all and it regenerates, giving you two starfish where you had one). If a spider treats a starfish as if it were centralized, it loses the battle. One of the first examples in the book is the approach the record majors took to P2P music filesharing, which I've always thought will figure for ever in business schools as a case study in terrible strategic decision-making.

The book translates its analysis into the handy rules which are required in management books, and it makes this a really approachable, practical and sensible guide for people in business or any kind of organization in fact. I'd put it in the same category of practical usefulness as the terrific Ricardo Semler's Maverick, or Atul Gawande's Better, although not as well-written as either. (Gawande has a new book out, The Checklist Manifesto, which I haven't read.)

The analysis in Starfish reminded me a lot of an older and seminal book, Kevin Kelly's Out of Control. (Kelly's online book-in-progress The Technium is also worth a look.)

I'd add something they don't spell out, which is that the change in optimal organizational form is technology-driven. When it's expensive to communicate information, a hierarchy is a good model (like a hub-and-spoke transport network). When it's cheap, it's more efficient to get the information and the decisions widely-dispersed. This seems obvious to me and I wrote an IPEG paper on governance about it a while ago, The Common Thread. But I don't know of other references to it. Maybe somebody who knows the IO literature better can help me?