If you cut off a spider's head, it dies; if you cut off a starfish's leg it grows a new one, and that leg can grow into an entirely new starfish. Traditional top-down organizations are like spiders, but now starfish organizations are changing the face of business and the world. Summary: The Starfish and the Spider. This complete summary of the ideas from Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom's book "The Starfish and the Spider" shows how most companies in the past were 'spiders', with rigid.
The Starfish and the Spirit. So there's a paper out there with the beetle's Latin name as a co-author on the paper. Just a little story. And here's another beetle that doesn't have that defense, but it mimics the posture. So a predator comes up, and this gets into this whole area of mimicry that we're going to talk about, where there are a lot of systems where you have a defense mechanism and then another organism evolves to mimic that defense even though it doesn't have the real thing.
So this beetle just assumes the posture and some of the predators think, oh, I better avoid that one. Fireflies have a particular flash that attracts. The females have a flash that attracts the mates of their particular species. And then there are many examples of this mimicry. These are two butterflies of different species. One of which is toxic or very unpalatable to prey species.
And the other is not unpalatable but because it looks like that one is less likely to be preyed upon. And people have done experiments to test hypotheses about these and shown how that works. And there are lots of also fly species that have evolved to look like these species for the same reason.
So there are several of these mimetic systems. So we're going to move on them to mutualism. So we've talked about minus-minus interactions, competition, minus-plus interactions, which was predation, and mutualism is plus-plus, win-win.
Both organisms benefit from being in contact with the other organisms. And several of the clips I'm going to show you have to do with mutualism. So I'm going to go through this rather quickly.
And these examples, for the most part, are from your book. I'm showing this example because it also has an experiment that goes with it in your book. These are treehoppers, like insects that suck on the sugar solutions from the tree.
And they squirt out the sugar for the ants that they're symbiotic with. They feed the ants because the ants, in turn, protect them from spider predators. And there are many systems like this. And I show you this one because they did experiments.
And you can do them easily. And these are plants. You can remove the plants and then measure whether the plants have an effect on treehopper survival. And so this is the average number of young treehoppers per plant with the ants, without the ants.
So with the ants there are more. And they also showed in this study, though, that if you, in years where the predators of the treehoppers, the spiders were less abundant, the symbiosis loosens up. There's no point in feeding the ants if you don't need them to protect you. So these are dynamic systems. So treehopper survivorship increased by the present of ants. Another system just like this is where ants live in these thorns in acacia plants.
These are hollowed out thorns that provide a habitat for the ants, but when the plant is vulnerable to herbivore grazers the ants all come out in force and scare off the herbivore.
This is my absolute favorite, one of my favorite biological systems of all times. And we're going to show a clip of this. These are tree cutter ants that go out and get pieces of leafs and bring them back to the nest, chew them up, and they farm this fungus on the leaf chewate or whatever you want to call them.
And then they eat the fungus. That's their food. So there's this mutualistic interaction between the ants and the fungus. And there's even a really interesting complexity here that you'll see in the clip where the ants actually also carry a bacterium on their chest that makes an antibiotic that keeps the fungus farm free of infection by other fungi that might take it over. So it's this beautiful, beautiful co-evolutionary system that predates human beings many, many, many millions and millions of years of agriculture.
I mean the ants are literally farming and of natural antibiotic. In fact, the major organs are replicated throughout each arm. If a starfish is cut in half, the animal does not die; instead two starfish will result. If an arm is cut off, a new arm grows. During the Cold War, the Americans and the Russians were engaged in an escalating battle of espionage and defence.
It was thought impossible that a plane could get anywhere near Russia, let alone the beating heart of Moscow, without the Russians knowing about it well in advance. Well, it happened. By effectively flying below the radar, a German fl ying student flew his small plane from Germany and successfully landed smack-bang in Red Square.
The central idea in The Starfish and the Spider will hav e a similar impact on business over the next decade. Even though there are well-known examples of succ essful decentralized organisations around us right now, coverage of this concept in the popular press is all but invisible. Yet, the ticking clock in the background suggests the pendulum that swings between centralization and decentralization is making a decisive strike in the opposite direction. Has no one noticed that the central sic!
In parallel with our opening story, it too is a result of Cold War defence. Have you been paying attention; have you noticed? Decentralized organizations pose a similar threat.
The game has changed, as any music industry executive will tell you. Napster started in a college dorm room and has dismantled th e music empires of the big five recording companies one swapped song at a time. The starfish had attacked the spider and won.
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