The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results

by Andrew McAfee, Reid Hoffman (Foreword by)

Overview

In this "handbook for disruptors" (Eric Schmidt), The Geek Way reveals a new way to get big things done. It will change the way you think about work, teams, projects, and culture, and give you the insight and tools you need to harness our human superpowers of learning and cooperation.

What is “being geeky?” It’s being a perennially curious person, one who's not afraid to tackle hard problems and embrace unconventional solutions. McAfee shows how the geeks have created a new culture based around four norms: science, ownership, speed, and openness. The geek way seems odd at first. It's not deferential to experts, fond of planning and process, afraid of mistakes, or obsessed with "winning." But it explains everything from why Montessori babies turn out to be creative tinkerers to how newcomers are disrupting industry after industry (and still just getting started).
 
When all four norms are in place, a culture emerges that is freewheeling, fast-moving, egalitarian, evidence-driven, argumentative, and autonomous. Why does the geek way work so much better? McAfee provides an original answer: because it taps into humanity's superpower, which is our ability to cooperate intensely and learn rapidly. By providing insights from the young discipline of cultural evolution, McAfee shows that when we come together under the right conditions, we quickly figure out how to build reusable spaceships and self-correcting organizations. Under the wrong conditions, though, we create bureaucracy, chronic delays, cultures of silence, and the other classic dysfunctions of the Industrial Era.
 
Mixing cutting-edge science, history, analysis, and stories that show the geek way in action, McAfee offers a new way to see the world and empowering tools for seizing the big opportunities of today and tomorrow.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668640463
Publisher:	Hachette Book Group
Publication date:	11/14/2023
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 5.70(h) x (d)

About the Author

Andrew McAfee is a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-founder and co-director of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. He studies how technological progress changes the world. He is the author of More from Less and the coauthor of the New York Times bestselling The Second Machine Age.

 

Reid Hoffman is cofounder of LinkedIn, a partner at Greylock, and widely viewed as one of the most successful investors of all time. A founding board member of PayPal, he is now a board member at Microsoft as well as other companies and nonprofits. He's the host of WaitWhat's award-winning podcast Masters of Scale and the bestselling author of The Startup of You, The Alliance, and Blitzscaling.

A student of neuroscience and speech pathology, Sean Patrick Hopkins has translated his understanding of human behavior and vocal performance into a career in storytelling. His classical training and versatility with dialects has helped to create distinct and varied characters across many genres. In addition to narrating over 100 audiobooks, he has been seen and heard on film, television, video games, and stages in New York City and across the country. When not in the booth, you can find him buried in genealogy research, out exploring our National Parks, and raising an amazing daughter alongside his wife, fellow narrator Patricia Santomasso.

Editorial Reviews

By combining management theory, competitive strategy, the science of evolution, psychology, military history, and cultural anthropology, McAfee has produced a remarkable work of synthesis that finally explains, with a single unified theory (which he dubs "the geek way") the reasons why the tech startup approach has taken over so much of the world.

co-founder of LinkedIn and New York Times bestsell Reid Hoffman

Andy understands that we haven’t just been creating new technologies in Silicon Valley — we’ve also been creating new ways to run a company in a world permeated by tech. Here he distills what we’ve come up with. This book is a handbook for disruptors.

former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt

How fast can you find out you are wrong? This is the predictive metric of success in Silicon Valley. Mcafee explains why the leaders who build organizations that will help everyone who works there learn really quickly whether they are right or wrong will win in the new economy. And he shows why the leaders who allow their success to dampen their eagerness to hear about it when they are wrong have sown the seeds of their own failure. Essential!

author of the New York Times bestselling Radical C Kim Scott

[A] smart, irreverent, informative guide to navigating the future of work. Companies that don’t follow The Geek Way, according to author Andy McAfee, will fall behind...Each of these simple words contains more than you can know, until you read this remarkable book.

Amy C. Edmondson

I've worked closely with Andy for more than a decade, I'm still blown away by this book. It's bold and original, relevant and rigorous, and immediately useful for any restless, curious innovator. In other words, for any geek.

Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab and c Erik Brynjolfsson

In industry after industry, corporate boards are asking management what their plan is to thrive in an unsettled, fast-changing environment. The Geek Way contains among the best answers I've seen to this critical question.

Dambisa Moyo

I can see dead companies. They're the large incumbents who still run themselves as if software isn’t eating the world. If you’d rather lead the transformation than be consumed by it, start putting this book's insights into practice as quickly as you can.

geek Steve Jurvetson

Juxtaposed to our outsized celebrity obsessed culture is the rise of a subtler but infinitely more powerful shift toward geek culture. The hegemony of geekdom in Silicon Valley and across the world is the underlying force that drives innovation and powers our economy. Andrew McAfee’s The Geek Way is the guidebook for understanding this shift and navigating these turbulent times.

bestselling author of The Rise of the Creative Cla Richard Florida

Andrew McAfee's The Geek Way​ outlines what has become a critical advantage for the United States, for Silicon Valley, and for many American companies. If you wish to understand the last twenty years of American life, and probably the next twenty as well, this book is essential reading.

author of Big Business: A Love Letter to an Am Tyler Cowen

11/06/2023

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. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

[A] smart, irreverent, informative guide to navigating the future of work. Companies that don’t follow The Geek Way, according to author Andy McAfee, will fall behind...Each of these simple words contains more than you can know, until you read this remarkable book.”—Amy C. Edmondson, Professor of Leadership & Management, Harvard Business School, and author of Right Kind of Wrong

"In industry after industry, corporate boards are asking management what their plan is to thrive in an unsettled, fast-changing environment. The Geek Way contains among the best answers I've seen to this critical question."—Dambisa Moyo, Global Economist; Member, House of Lords

"I've worked closely with Andy for more than a decade, I'm still blown away by this book. It's bold and original, relevant and rigorous, and immediately useful for any restless, curious innovator. In other words, for any geek."—Erik Brynjolfsson, Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab and co-author of the New York Times bestselling The Second Machine Age

“Juxtaposed to our outsized celebrity obsessed culture is the rise of a subtler but infinitely more powerful shift toward geek culture. The hegemony of geekdom in Silicon Valley and across the world is the underlying force that drives innovation and powers our economy. Andrew McAfee’s The Geek Way is the guidebook for understanding this shift and navigating these turbulent times.”—Richard Florida, bestselling author of The Rise of the Creative Class and The New Urban Crisis

“By combining management theory, competitive strategy, the science of evolution, psychology, military history, and cultural anthropology, McAfee has produced a remarkable work of synthesis that finally explains, with a single unified theory (which he dubs "the geek way") the reasons why the tech startup approach has taken over so much of the world.”—Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and New York Times bestselling author of The Start Up of You

"How fast can you find out you are wrong? This is the predictive metric of success in Silicon Valley. Mcafee explains why the leaders who build organizations that will help everyone who works there learn really quickly whether they are right or wrong will win in the new economy. And he shows why the leaders who allow their success to dampen their eagerness to hear about it when they are wrong have sown the seeds of their own failure. Essential!"—Kim Scott, author of the New York Times bestselling Radical Candor and Radical Respect

“The Geek Way makes a fascinating case that the most important technological revolution of our time isn’t what companies make, but how they’re managed. Andy McAfee is a world-class intellectual provocateur—he never ceases to challenge my assumptions and sharpen my thinking—and reading this book will do the same for you.  It’s the most compelling analysis I’ve seen of what Silicon Valley has learned about building more effective organizations, and what they still have to learn.”

—Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of THINK AGAIN and HIDDEN POTENTIAL, and host of the TED podcast Re:Thinking

“Andy understands that we haven’t just been creating new technologies in Silicon Valley — we’ve also been creating new ways to run a company in a world permeated by tech. Here he distills what we’ve come up with. This book is a handbook for disruptors.”—Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google

"I can see dead companies. They're the large incumbents who still run themselves as if software isn’t eating the world. If you’d rather lead the transformation than be consumed by it, start putting this book's insights into practice as quickly as you can."—Steve Jurvetson, geek

"Andrew McAfee's The Geek Way​ outlines what has become a critical advantage for the United States, for Silicon Valley, and for many American companies. If you wish to understand the last twenty years of American life, and probably the next twenty as well, this book is essential reading."—Tyler Cowen, author of Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero

"Solid business economics meets a nouveau-science insistence on quick learning and quicker cultural evolution...A valuable guide for would-be economic, technical, and cultural disruptors."—Kirkus Reviews

“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…This volume in McAfee’s stable of books will be a welcome addition to business collections in academic and public libraries.”

—Val Edwards, Booklist

The Geek Way shows how easy it can be to slip into such organizational flaws as runaway bureaucracy and management by fiat. By fashioning the alternatives into a coherent system, Mr. McAfee has created a powerful synthesis that anyone who occupies or aspires to a position of authority would do well to explore.—The Wall Street Journal

"Technology guru Andrew McAfee posits that underlying the remarkable performance of the Silicon Valley giants is not just that they are at the center of a technological revolution, but also, that they are leading a revolution in how business is done—which he describes as the Geek Way."—Fortune

From the Publisher

2023-09-01
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.

Kirkus Reviews