• Embed Doc
  • Copy Link
  • Readcast
  • Collections
  • CommentGo Back
Download
 
Not using Adobe Acrobat? Please go tohttp://changethis.com/content/reader
next
 
+
x
Sav to disk[
help
]Hid/Sow mnus
Changing the Rules
 — 
Lessons rom a Starfsh World 
By Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom
ChangeThis
U
No
 
27.03
 
x
+
/11
Welcome to a world where a battle between the Spanish conquistadors and the ApacheIndians explains the woes of the recording industry. Where Wikipedia and Alcoholics
Anonymous teach us how to ght terrorism. And where leaderless organizations aretaking business and society by storm. It all comes down to the diference between starsh
and spiders.
At rst glance, a starsh looks a lot like a spider—both creatures appear to have legs radiatingfrom a central body. But looks can be deceiving. With a spider, what you see is pretty muchwhat you get. A body’s a body, a head’s a head, and a leg’s a leg. Cut o the leg of a spider,and you end up with a seven-legged creature. Cut o its head, and the spider dies.But with starsh it’s a whole dierent story. If you cut o an arm of a starsh, it will grow anew arm. And even more incredibly, the severed arm can grow an entirely new body. Starshcan perform this magical regeneration because a starsh is a neural network—basically, anetwork of cells. Instead of having a head like a spider, the starsh replicates all of its organsacross each leg. The starsh doesn’t have a brain, there is no central command, and there is
no hierarchy.
Cut of t g o a sidr, and you nd u wit asvn-ggd cratur. Cut of its ad, and tsidr dis.
ChangeThis
No
 
27.03
U
 
x
+
/11
 Just as there are starsh and spiders in the animal kingdom, there are starsh and spiderorganizations. And when a spider organization takes on a starsh weird things happen.Take the story of the famous Spanish explorer, Hernando Cortés. When he encountered theAztecs in 1519, Cortés expected to see savages. Instead, he found a civilization with apopulation of more than fteen million, its own language, an advanced calendar, and acentral government. “The city,” he marveled, “is as large as Seville and Cordoba.”But Cortés hadn’t come to sightsee. He had come in search of gold, and the Aztecs hadplenty of it. Seeing an opportunity to get rich, Cortés went on the attack.He met with the Aztec leader, Montezuma II, and threatened to kill him unless he handedover the gold. Montezuma obliged, but Cortés killed him anyway, and chaos ensued.The Spanish army surrounded the Aztec capital, barricaded the roads, and blocked o 
the aqueducts.
By 1521, just two years after Cortés had arrived, the entire Aztec empire—a civilization thattraced its roots to centuries before the time of Christ—had collapsed. The Aztecs weren’talone. The Spanish had similarly conquered the Incas, and they eventually gained control of the entire continent. By the 1680s, the Spanish seemed unstoppable. With the winds of victory at their backs, they headed north and encountered the Apache. This meeting—in thedeserts of present-day New Mexico—sheds light on such disparate conicts as America’scurrent war on terror and the record industry’s battle against music swappers. Why? Becausethe Spanish lost.
But Cortés adn’t com to sigts. H ad comin sarc o god, and t Aztcs ad nty o it.
ChangeThis
No
 
27.03
U
of 00

Leave a Comment

You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...
You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...