Amstelden

The Geek Way - Andrew McAfee

Note: These are my own notes and observations upon reading the book. They serve as a reminder, when I need to rehash some content. I own none of the content.

Introduction

Summary

"We've paid a lot of attention to the computer revolution kicked off by the geeks. But I think we've been misunderstanding the other revolution they initiated: a still-unfolding revolution in the company itself. The business geeks have taken the standard corporate culture of the industrial era and given it an upgrade."

"The geek way is a set of solutions for thriving in a faster-moving business world. They're cultural solutions, not technological ones."

"The geek way leans into arguments and loathes bureaucracy. It favors iteration over planning, shuns coordination, and tolerates some chaos. Its practitioners are vocal and egalitarian, and they're not afraid to fail, challenge the boss, or be proven wrong. Instead of respecting hierarchy and credentials, they respect helpfulness and chops."

"To understand why the geek way works so well, we're going to draw on research from the young field of cultural evolution. Cultural evolution's insights haven't yet spread to the business world. So there's a huge opportunity to be at the forefront of applying them."

"I'll spend a lot of time explaining how the business geeks run their companies. But I'll spend at least as much time explaining why these approaches work as well as they do. With that understanding, any company that wants to can quickly get geekier."

The fourfold path to geekdom

Summary

"The geek way consists of four norms: behaviors that a group's member 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 processes, and less coordination. Third is the norm of science: conducting experiments, 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."

"Because of these norms, geek companies' cultures are more freewheeling, fast-moving, evidence-driven, egalitarian, argumentative, and autonomous than those of the typical industrial-era corporation."

"These cultures fuel impressive performance, and they empower people and give them autonomy."

"A bunch of geeks have figured out a better way to run a company. As a result, they're taking over the economy."

Dialed in

Summary

"The towns of Silicon Valley feel like sleepy suburbs, but in the twenty-first century they've become the world's epicenter of capitalist value creation. The Valley has more fast-growing, innovative, world-changing companies than anyplace else."

"The standard explanation for this remarkable performance is that Silicon Valley is the center of the US tech industry, but instead of focusing on the growth of an industry called tech, my story is about the rise of a corporate culture called geek."

"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 become 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."

Ultra and Ultimate

Summary

"Maybe Homo sapiens isn't the best name for our species. I think a better name -- one that really highlights what makes us unique and what has made us so successful -- is Homo ultrasocialis. Humans cooperate more intensely and evolve their cultures faster than any other animals. We're the planet's only ultrasocial creatures."

"Our intelligence alone can't keep us alive, but our social groups can and do. Our groups hold the knowledge and know-how we need. Without them, we're goners. Withing them, we build spaceships."

"Because evolution has shaped us to be so social, we adjust our behavior in all kinds of ways, in response to all kinds of cues, in order to maintain or improve our position within the group. And when the social environment shifts, we shift right along with it."

"Increasing observability and decreasing plausible deniability are core to the geek way. They're two essential tools in the geek toolkit for building and maintaining healthy norms."

"Business geeks and scientists who study evolution have independently come to the same conclusion: that humanity's superpower is at the level of the group, not the individual, so it makes sense to focus on the group."

"Here's the ultimate geek ground rule: Shape the ultrasociality of group members so that the group's cultural evolution is as rapid as possible in the desired direction."

Science

Summary

"We humans are chronically overconfident and subject to confirmation bias. As a result, we make poor decisions and poor forecasts."

"The ultimate explanation for overconfidence is that it's beneficial for us ultrasocial human beings to appear confident to others. So evolution has equipped us with a mental press secretary module that constantly generates a favorable self-image."

"Our press secretaries deceive us not just about the quality of our ideas and judgement, but also about many other things: our generosity, our morals and ethics, our social status, our looks, -- any arena where it would be advantageous for us Homo ultrasocialis to be perceived favorably by others."

"Because of the press secretary, we're bad at evaluating our own ideas. But we're excellent at evaluating the ideas of others. Our minds are inherently justificatory about their own ideas, and argumentative about the ideas of others."

"The geek norm of science is all about arguing. It also specifies how to win arguments: with evidence. Not seniority or charisma or past performance or rhetoric or philosophizing or appeals to morality or aesthetics, but evidence."

"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."

Survey for your organization

Ownership

Summary

"Companies have a puzzling tendency to become excessively bureaucratic even though bureaucracy frustrates people and hurts performance. It's an undesirable Nash equilibrium."

"The ultimate explanation is that dense bureaucracy is the result of status seeking by us status-obsessed Homo ultrasocialis. We invent work so that we can be part of it. We strive to be consulted on lots of decisions, and if possible have veto power over them. Excess bureaucracy is a bug for anyone who wants a company to run efficiently, but it's a feature for the Homo ultrasocialis who seek opportunities to gain status in the organization."

"The fight against bureaucracy and sclerosis, business geeks take a radical step: they stop a lot of coordination, collaboration, and communication and instead establish a norm of ownership, or clear and sole responsibility for an agreed-upon goal."

"The geeks' distaste for coordination can seem extreme. They often don't even want teams to talk with each other, or with the higher-ups in the company. They believe that cross-team communication can be harmful because it often turns into a soft form of bureaucracy."

"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."

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Speed

Summary

"Most large projects are finished late, and their problems don't become apparent until their original completion date 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 project, 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."

"To combat the liar's club, the business geeks rely on the norm of speed: iterating quickly and getting feedback from customers. The iteration and feedback are observable, which breaks up the liar's club."

"Another benefit of speed is that it accelerates learning. Setting up projects to generate lots of models (via modularity) and lots of generations (via fast iteration) lets us Homo ultrasocialis learn faster from one another."

"For the geek norm of speed, the ultimate ground rule is: To accelerate learning and progress, plan less and iterate more; organize projects around short cycles in which participants show their work, have access to peers and models, deliver to customers, and get feedback."

"The geeks see the long time scales of many industrial-era companies as a profound vulnerability. The two keys to exploiting it are a faster cadence and high levels of observability."

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Openness

Summary

"Many companies have 'Model 1' norms: be in unilateral control over others; strive to win and minimize losing; suppress negative feelings. These sound sensible, but they're actually corrosive because they create a culture of defensiveness and undiscussability."

"Model 1 strangles and squelches the things that the business geeks are adamant about. It creates corporate cultures that are the opposite of freewheeling, fast-moving, evidence-driven, egalitarian, argumentative, and autonomous."

"The business geeks avoid defensiveness by embracing a norm of openness, which we can define as sharing information and being receptive to arguments, reevaluations, and changes in direction."

"The geeks realize that the two goals of 'strive to win and minimize losing' are incompatible -- that in the long run, winning necessitates conducting experiments, taking risks, and placing bets, not all of which are going to succeed."

"Common knowledge (an extreme form of information sharing) is organizational truth serum."

"For the geek norm of openness, the ultimate ground rule is: Welcome challenges to the status quo and increase common knowledge in order to combat defensiveness and undiscussable topics."

"The ultimate definition of a norm is that it's any behavior where noncompliance leads to punishment via social rejection."

"Openness holds a special place among the great geek norms: it's a distributed self-correction mechanism."

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Conclusion

Summary

"None of the business geeks I spoke to for this book think they've discovered the corporate fountain of youth. They don't think that their companies -- or anyone else's -- have figured out how to be permanently successful."

"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"

"There's always a deep tension between organizations and the people that make them up. An organization wants its members to pursue its goals, while the members themselves want to pursue their goals. Today's tech giants have solved many hard problems, but the gravity like pull of bureaucratization still bedevils them."

"The geek way is not effortlessly self-sustaining. Its advocates stressed to me how much work it takes to maintain strong norms of science, ownership, speed, and openness, and how, even when they're in place, the classic dysfunctions can still creep in."

"I don't know where the next cohort of large, innovative, fast-growing, customer- and investor-delighting companies is going to come from. But I do know that they're not going to be following the industrial-era business playbook, because that playbook just doesn't work as well the geek way."

"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."