praise for McAfee’s
new book The Geek Way:
The Geek Way Endorsements

“Juxtaposed with our outsize celebrity-obsessed culture is a subtler but infinitely more powerful shift toward geek culture. The hegemony of geekdom in Silicon Valley and across the world drives innovation and powers our economy. The Geek Way is the guidebook for understanding this shift and navigating these turbulent times.”

— Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class and The New Urban Crisis

“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 can help workers learn 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 when they are wrong have sown the seeds of their own failure. Essential!”

— Kim Scott, author of Radical Candor and Radical Respect

“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

“[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

“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'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 New York Times bestselling co-author of the The Second Machine Age

"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 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

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New York Times bestselling author Andrew McAfee reveals a new way to get big things done. This book will change how you think about work, teams, projects, and culture, and give you the insight and tools you need to harness your 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. Andrew McAfee shows how the geeks have created a new culture based on 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 does explain everything from why Montessori babies turn out to be creative tinkerers to the ways in which 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 well? McAfee provides an original answer: because it taps into humanity’s superpower, which is the ability to both cooperate intensely and learn rapidly. By sharing insights from the young discipline of cultural evolution, The Geek Way shows that when we come together under the right conditions, we quickly figure out how to innovate, whether we’re building reusable spaceships or self-correcting organizations. Under the wrong conditions, however, we create bureaucracy, chronic delays, cultures of silence, and other classic dysfunctions of the industrial era.

Mixing cutting-edge science, history, analysis, and stories that show the geek way in action, this book offers a new way to see the world as well as empowering tools for seizing the big opportunities of today and tomorrow.