The Starfish and the Spider

Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom's The Starfish and the Spider is about the differences between centralized and decentralized organizations, and posits that decentralized organizations have a huge advantage over monoloithic ones. While my bias is certainly towards believing that starfish (decentralized) groups have many advantages over spiders (centralized), I don't think that leaderless organizations have an "unstoppable power" as the book's cover claims. The book doesn't go on to back up that claim, either. I was left with the distinct impression that this is a business school white-paper that's not really all that useful to leaders in the real world. After getting about halfway through, I was rolling my eyes at some of the statements that were made, and the chapters got fairly repetitive about how awesome starfish are.

SiCKO

I just got back from seeing SiCKO, Michael Moore's new film (I hesitate to call it a documentary) that was mostly about the health insurance industry/universal health care, a little about corruption in the government, a little about Canada, a little about the war in Iraq and on terror, and with a cameo for Flint, Michigan. It was an interesting movie to watch, although I still felt it necessary to take it with a grain of salt. The part where he takes the first responders to Cuba and says that they got the same treatment as any Cuban national seems a bit stretched. It still challenged some of my assumptions about universal healthcare in Canada and England, and also made me want to look into whether Hillary Clinton is independent of the health care industry. Well worth watching, and on a subject that doesn't seem to have gotten much coverage since Hillary was the first lady.

Founders at Work

I finally finished reading Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work and I know that I'll be re-reading (and then re-re-reading) some of those interviews in the near future. Wow. There's almost too much information for me to process about starting up a technology (or most any) company, including stories of what went wrong and right, how to do things better, what matters and what doesn't, and all sorts of other good stuff. There's nothing beyond the interviews, but those are enough (except the interview with the CEO of Lycos...all that one told me is don't hire that guy as a manager). Flexability and persistence seemed to be the two major themes, with passion and having a good co-founder close behind.

What a Party

Terry McAuliffe, former chairman of the DNC, has a new book out, What a Party, that's an unabashedly completely biased look at the Democratic party and Bill and Hillary Clinton. It's a history of his time in the party, why he thinks Democrats are better than Republicans, and why he thinks Hillary should be the next President of the United States (he's also Hillary's campaign chairman). For all that though, it was an interesting and fun read.