The GEEK WAY
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 abilityto 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.
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Available November 14th
Foreward by Reid Hoffman
I strongly believe that great technology entrepreneurs aren’t just technology geeks, they’re also business geeks. In the words of Apple’s famous advertising campaign, they find ways to “think different.” They apply their insatiable curiosity and love of experimentation to the challenge of building better products and companies. But while most people recognize that we now live in a veritable Age of Geekdom, no one seems to have analyzed and explained the core principles and mechanisms of business geekery. Even my own books, such as The Alliance and Blitzscaling, which definitely geek out on people management and building multibillion-dollar businesses respectively, don’t examine the meta question of why the geeks have inherited the Earth.
With his new book, The Geek Way, Andrew McAfee (who is himself an alpha geek of the business variety) tackles the central questions of what geeks are, what they believe, and why they have been so successful in the past few decades. By combining management theory, competitive strategy, the science of evolution, psychology, military history, and cultural anthropology, he 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.
While many of his conclusions come from an in‑depth analysis of successful tech startups and tech giants such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix, he also draws lessons from grade-school children, military planners, and chimpanzees and explains why seemingly human frailties like overconfidence, prestige, and gossip are actually essential to successful organizations.
Along the way, you’ll learn why so many organizations descend into bureaucracy and unethical behavior, and the four key principles you can use to build a culture that combats these value-destroying villains. I predict that this book’s greatest lasting contribution will be the way in which it presents a clear, detailed, evidence-based explanation of how culture works and why it is so important. Never again will you look at culture as a fuzzy, hand-waving management buzzword.
This book is a must-read for any leader who has wondered how to build a twenty-first-century organization. For those outside the technology industry, McAfee demystifies key concepts such as A/B testing and agile software development. But even technology veterans can benefit from understanding how so many industry best practices and articles of faith stem from underlying elements of human nature that evolved over millions of years. I consider myself a longtime student and chronicler of Silicon Valley, and I still took copious notes on the many new things I learned from reading this book. I think you’ll have the same experience.