Book Review: The Geek Way – The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results

The book is written byAndrew McAfee, who is is New York Times bestselling co-author of The Second Machine Age. He is the co-director of the IDE and a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management. As presented in his bio, his research investigates how information technology changes the way companies perform, organize themselves, and compete.

The twenty main takeaways that I got out of this book are presented below:

• Nineteen ninety-four (1994) – it was the year that Netscape Navigator, the first commercial web browser, was released. It was the year, in other words, when computers and networks really started to come together and cover the planet. The birth of the World Wide Web kicked off one of humanity’s biggest projects, and one that’s still ongoing: interconnecting the world’s people via technology and giving us on-demand access to both a decent chunk of our accumulated knowledge and huge amounts of computing power.
• As we moved deeper into the second machine age, entire industries collapsed. US newspaper advertising revenues declined by two-thirds between 2000 and 2015, erasing a full half century of growth. Magazines didn’t fare much better; their ad revenue dropped by 40 percent between 2008 and 2018. The growing popularity of music streaming services hasn’t come close to offsetting the near elimination of CDs and other physical media; revenues from recorded music fell by more 46 percent between 1999 and 2021.
• Geeks care about their passions a lot more than they care about mainstream opinion. As Dictionary.com puts it, a geek is “a peculiar person, especially one who is perceived to be overly intellectual, unfashionable, or socially awkward.” Jeff Bezos embraced the unfashionable aspect of geekdom in Amazon’s 2011 shareholder meeting. In response to a question about how the company innovates, he replied, “Very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.” Geeks aren’t concerned about going with the flow. They’ll go wherever their inquiries take them… A clear statement of many aspects of the geek way appeared in 2009, when Netflix’s CEO, Reed Hastings, and his chief talent officer, Patty McCord, uploaded a long PowerPoint presentation, titled “Netflix Culture: Freedom & Responsibility,” to SlideShare, an online service that does exactly what its name implies. The Netflix culture deck became both blueprint and affirmation for many people trying to build companies, and it spread like a rumor (it’s been viewed more than 17 million times). Those of us who write business books don’t love the idea that what “may well be the most important document ever to come out of [Silicon] Valley” is a PowerPoint presentation. But that’s what Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said about the Netflix culture deck. Hastings’s ideas about how to build and sustain a culture of freedom and responsibility so impressed Sandberg and her colleagues that they asked Hastings to join Facebook’s board of directors in 2011.
• For those unfamiliar with Montessori, here’s a quick explanation, Montessori classrooms are designed to be self-directed learning labs for children… “I remember my first one as a large, light-filled room, parts of which were dedicated to different activities. In one area there were beads strung together on wires to form lines, squares, and cubes (which turns out to be a great way to convey the difference between x, x?, and x*). Another space had cloth letters I could play with to ease me into the concept of reading. Other areas had polygons to trace, 3D shapes to play with, simple abacuses, pens and pencils and paper, and so on… The gear in the classrooms was great, but what I really loved about my Montessori school was the freedom. There were a few scheduled activities each day-lunch, recess, “circle time,” when teachers and students sat on the foor in a circle and talked about stuff-but most of the time I could do what I wanted. And what I and my classmates wanted wasn’t to break things, run around yelling, or terrorize each other. Instead, we wanted to sit quietly and learn.”
• The thinking is that letting kids do what they want throughout the school day might make them happy, and might even make them creative, but it won’t make them good at reading, writing, and arithmetic… Montessori kept proving how wrong that view is. Early in the twentieth century, she demonstrated that disadvantaged children — even those traumatized by World War I could, through her methods, make remarkable progress in acquiring all the basic skills they needed. Almost a hundred years later, in 2006, a study published in Science by psychologists Angeline Lillard and Nicole Else-Quest found that kids from low- and middle-income families in Milwaukee who were enrolled in Montessori schools did better than their peers in several of the cognitive and social domains evaluated, and worse in none of them.
• Montessori is a hero to today’s business geeks for several reasons. First, she was a true geek herself. She immersed herself in a tough and important problem — how do children learn best? — devised unconventional solutions, and then advocated tirelessly for them. Second, her educational methods foster the kinds of innovation and creativity that contribute to success in the business world…
• Over the past couple decades, research by a multidisciplinary band of social scientists has coalesced into a field of study called cultural evolution. This field gets at the classic Why do we humans do what we do? question by starting with an observation: we’re not the only species on the planet that forms cultures, but we are the only species with cultures capable of launching spaceships and doing other insanely difficult and complicated things. This observation quickly leads to a bunch of questions: How do human cultures get smarter over time? What accelerates that accumulation of knowledge, or slows it down? Why are some cultures more successful than others? When cultures clash, which ones win? What are the most common ways for cultures to decay? How do individuals acquire, generate, and pass on knowledge? How do we balance our individual interests with those of the group? When individuals misbehave, how do their cultures bring them back in line?… The field of cultural evolution has been investigating these questions for a while now and has come up with solid, stress-tested answers… The great news is that the answers apply to corporate cultures just as well as they do to all the other kinds of cultures we humans create.
• How does innovation happen? What accelerates it, or slows it down? Why are some businesses more innovative and successful than others? When businesses compete, which ones win? What are the most common ways for businesses to become uncompetitive over time? What makes individuals productive? What makes teams work well together? How can we best align people’s desire to get ahead with the goals of the organization? What kinds of bad behavior should we expect within an organization, and how can we minimize them?
• The Norms Geeks Form – The geek way is not about a suite of technologies (like machine learning or robotics) or a style of strategic thinking. Instead, it’s about norms: behaviors that a group’s members expect of each other. Norms are extraordinarily important for any organization because they’re a kind of community policing: if you don’t follow them, your peers will let you know it and work to bring you back in line. Norms aren’t maintained solely by the bosses, and they aren’t all written down in the employee handbook. But even though they can seem nebulous, they’re powerful; they shape people’s behavior in deep ways… Modern business geeks are pulling away from the competition because they’re doing the radical work of questioning assumptions (including their own) about how to run a company, discarding what doesn’t work and replacing it with something better. In short, the geeks are upgrading the company… This upgrade is universally applicable and available. To install it at your own organization you don’t need venture capital funding, a workforce full of young computer science PhDs, or a headquarters in Silicon Valley. You just need to be willing to do some things differently. The challenge is that these are fundamental things: organizing major efforts, making decisions, executing and coordinating work, interacting with colleagues, and — maybe most importantly — deciding which behaviors get rewarded and which ones get discouraged.
• The geek way consists of four norms: behaviors that a group’s members expect of each other. The first is speed: a preference for achieving results by iterating rapidly instead of planning extensively. The second norm is ownership. Compared to industrial-era organizations, geek companies have higher levels of personal autonomy, empowerment, and responsibility, fewer cross-functional pro-cesses, and less coordination. Third is the norm of science: conducting exper-iments, generating data, and debating how to interpret evidence. The fourth and final great geek norm is openness: sharing information and being receptive to arguments, reevaluations, and changes in direction.
• The geeks asked, Can’t we do better? Why should we tolerate corporate cultures that are the biggest barriers to innovation instead of the biggest supporters and nurturers of this critical activity? Why should we accept that important efforts are just about always going to be late, or that high levels of bureaucracy and hypocrisy are to be expected? Why should so few employees actually know why they’re doing what they’re doing?… The business geeks looked at the typical company of the early twenty-first century and came to the same conclusion that Maria Montessori did after studying Italian schools in the early twentieth: We can do better along every dimension that matters. The geeks believed that they could build companies that move faster, execute better, and innovate more, while giving their people a better sense of belonging and empowerment.
• Recent research indicates that there’s a distinct geek corporate culture with high levels of empowerment and autonomy; it fosters innovation, agility, and execution… Whether you’re a fan or foe or competitor of geek companies, it’s valuable to spend time understanding how they became so dominant. My argument is simple: the cultures they’ve created are critical enablers of their success… People want to work in healthy environments, and we now know how to create them, thanks to two very different communities: a new cohort of geek business founders and leaders, and scientists asking and answering questions about human behavior and cultural evolution… In addition to learning, the other thing that makes humans stand out is how well we work together. We’re the only species that cooperates intensely in large groups of unrelated individuals. Ants, bees, and a few other social insects do well at the “cooperate intensely” part — they communicate, coordinate, and specialize as they get food, fight invaders, and raise their young — but they do it all as members of one big family; they’re all genetically related. Some other animals cooperate, but not nearly as deeply as the social insects do. As psychologist Michael Tomasello says about the species that’s our closest relative: “It is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together.”
• The more I learn, the more skeptical I get about the ability of individual-level training and education to make a lasting difference at an organization. l agree with the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who says, “Nobody is ever going to invent an ethics class that makes people behave ethically after they step out of the classroom” and go back to work. But as we saw with the Kenyan TB medicine study, changes at the level of the group can make a huge positive difference in prosocial behaviors… Here’s the ultimate geek ground rule: Shape the ultrasociality of group members so that the group’s cultural evolution is moving as rapid as possible in the desired direction. That ground rule might not have made a lot of sense before you started reading this book, but I hope it makes some sense now. At a high level, shaping the group’s ultrasociality means putting in place the norms of science, ownership, speed, and openness.
• We humans are chronically overconfident and subject to confirmation bias. As a result, we make poor decisions and poor forecasts… For the norm of science, the ultimate geek ground rule is: Conduct evidence-based arguments so that the group makes better decisions and predictions, and estimates… Business geeks have to watch out as they argue, because they can fail to create cultures with high levels of psychological safety.
• Nadella realized that the fight against bureaucracy and sclerosis isn’t a fight against some group of bad actors. It’s instead a fight against a badly configured environment — one that lets us Homo ultrasocialis gain status in ways that aren’t tightly aligned with the goals of the organization. Geek leaders like Nadella work hard to create very different environments. Doing so entails rejecting a lot of the received wisdom of the industrial era about how important communication, cooperation, and cross-functional coordination are and instead striving to build autonomous and aligned organizations that unconstrain people and give them ownership.
• To ensure that their autonomous teams remain aligned with the company’s overall goals, geek companies rely on a bureaucracy that’s powerful yet tightly constrained. Its job is to oversee the work of translating the company’s high-level vision and strategy into team-level objectives and key results… For the norm of ownership, the ultimate geek ground rule is: To reduce bureaucracy, take away opportunities to gain status that aren’t aligned with the goals and values of the company.
• More large projects are finished late, and their problems don’t become apparent until their original completion dare draws near. This phenomenon is called the “90 percent syndrome…” The “liar’s club” is a major cause of the 90 percent syndrome. During a proj-ect, members of the liar’s club say that they’re on time even when they’re not, and hope that someone else gets found out first. The liar’s club thrives on low observability and high plausible deniability.
• We the Problem – There’s a problem facing all companies, geek or not, that’s even deeper and more pervasive than overconfident leaders making bad decisions. It’s us. It’s all of us. It’s that we want what we want, and our wants get misaligned with the goals of organizations that we’re part of. As we’ve seen, we create liar’s clubs and elaborate bureaucracies. We form coalitions that fight for turf, then fight to keep it. We act defensively and try to be in unilateral control… We work hard to ignore reality when reality makes us look bad. We punish those who violate norms, even if those norms — like staying silent about unethical practices— are harmful to the organization.
• Companies that grew up during the industrial era have to throw away that era’s playbook if they want to stand a chance when the geeks come to town. The idea that companies following the old playbook can fight back effectively against the geek way by doing a major reorganization, embracing a bold new strategy, or shuffling the leadership is laughable. Incumbents did all of these things over the past twenty years; they didn’t halt the disruption, or even slow it down much. The industrial-era playbook yields companies that move too slowly, are wrong too often, miss too many important devel-opments, don’t learn and improve quickly enough, and fail to give their people the autonomy, empowerment, purpose, and voice that they want and deserve. These are insurmountable handicaps once competitors start adopting the geek way.
• There’s a problem facing all companies. It’s that we humans want what we want, and our wants get misaligned with the goals of organizations that we’re part of. We create liar’s clubs and elaborate bureaucracies. We form coalitions that fight for turf, then fight to keep it. We act defensively and try to be in unilateral control. We work hard to ignore reality when reality makes us look bad. We punish those who violate norms, even if those norms— like not speaking up about unethical practices — are harmful to the organization.