The Geek Way

October 1, 2023
Solid business economics meets a nouveau-science insistence on quick learning and quicker cultural evolution. McAfee, co-founder of MIT's Initiative on the Digital Economy and author of More From Less, describes an ethic whereby people "get fascinated by a topic and won't (or can't) let go of it, no matter what others think." Gathering those kinds of people and getting anything done involves "cultural solutions, not technological ones." One of them is a highly developed tolerance for chaos. Another is developing a thick skin when it comes to criticism, since these geeks are seldom hypersocialized and tend to speak their minds without filtering. McAfee examines numerous organizations that have built nonbureaucratic and--importantly--nonperfectionist cultures, such as Planet, a company launching satellites, radios, and cameras into space, with a new rocket shooting into near space every three months or so. Says one Planetoid, "we have an iteration time schedule that's measured in months while NASA's is measured in a decade or two," a "pace of innovation" that hinges on the good-enough rather than the perfect. (So far, thank the stars, the good-enough hasn't ended in catastrophe.) A similar emphasis on speedy action has resulted in Netflix's supremacy as a streaming service as opposed to the ultra-cautious, now-extinct Quibi, which "was structured and run like a twentieth-century Hollywood studio." Cautionary tales abound, since, as McAfee notes, the tendency to bureaucratize is always there to kill or discourage McAfee's mantra-like insistence on "innovation, agility, and execution." As much as anything else, he adds, a successful geek-culture enterprise will eschew emotion for science, which is empirically verifiable and whose terms are constantly argued over, hopefully without anyone being offended in the bargain. On that note, the author offers another mantra-like element to consider: "Reflect, don't defend." A valuable guide for would-be economic, technical, and cultural disruptors.

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October 15, 2023
Touting geek culture as a pathway to transformative business growth, McAfee embraces the definition of geekiness as obsessive and celebrates the burning curiosity that drives inquiry into both the how and the why of solutions. Four ""Norms of Geek Corporate Culture"" (speed, ownership, science, and openness) are outlined and defined. Each norm receives its own exploration and illumination through real-world examples of successes and failures (Netflix, Meta). An acknowledgement that the pervasive geek culture of Silicon Valley lacks much in the way of psychological safety provides a bit of balance to the wholehearted embrace of autonomy, speed, data, and innovation. There is an awareness that the assets of concentration, agility, and shared information can be tainted by overconfidence and cognitive bias. Each chapter is summarized, focusing on the four ""Norms of Geek Collaborative Culture"" and including surveys to assist readers in assessing their own corporate cultures. This volume in McAfee's stable of books will be a welcome addition to business collections in academic and public libraries

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

November 6, 2023
Geeks excel at more than just Dungeons and Dragons and fan fiction, according to this chipper treatise. McAfee (Enterprise 2.0), a research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, argues that a new generation of “business geeks” (“people who got properly obsessed with the hard problem of running a modern company”) have developed a corporate culture that improves upon the “established practices of the industrial era” by embracing four principles: openness (share information and be receptive to colleagues’ input), ownership (entrust workers with high levels of autonomy), science (conduct experiments on best practices and debate “how to interpret evidence”), and speed (test products or services frequently and quickly incorporate changes based on feedback). Case studies show these tenets at work, as when McAfee describes how the CEO of a marketing software company exemplified openness by accepting criticism about an employee education program from a young, recent hire without getting defensive. McAfee takes glee in discussing failed corporate initiatives (the short-lived streaming platform Quibi, which he faults for failing to test its product pre-release, serves as a punchline throughout) and stories about how executives at Google, Amazon, and Netflix benefited from adopting a more “geeky” culture offer insight into some of the tech world’s most recognizable companies. Business leaders would do well to check this out.