Andrew McAfee has some pedigree. He wrote “The second machine age” and “Machine, platform, crowd”. Both are excellent. He decided to take a different avenue with “The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset That Drives Extraordinary Results”. The book aims to give an alternative perspective on organisational design. Going geek. Following in the footsteps of Jeff Bezos. Geeks going mainstream.
Why?
Why should we tolerate corporate cultures that are the biggest barriers to innovation instead of the biggest supporters and nurturers of this critical activity? Why should we accept that important efforts are just about always going to be late or that high levels of bureaucracy and hypocrisy are to be expected? Why should so few employees actually know why they’re doing what they’re doing?
- In a 2017 Harvard Business Review survey, nearly two-thirds of respondents reported that their companies had moderate to severe bureaucracy, and only 1% felt bureaucracy-free.
- Hamel and Zanini constructed a “bureaucracy mass index” (BMI) survey. Any score above 60 was considered at least moderate bureaucratic drag, while any score below 40 showed “a relative absence of bureaucracy.” Fewer than 1% of respondents scored less than 40.
- 2020 study of over five hundred large US companies found essentially no correlation between stated corporate values and actual culture as assessed by employees.
- Robert Kaplan and David Norton found that “a mere 7% of employees today fully understand their company’s business strategies and what’s expected of them in order to help achieve company goals.
Because of the belief in the importance of coordination, communication, cross-functional processes, and control, companies that follow the old playbook and become more bureaucratic and sclerotic over time.
The challenge
The challenge for entrepreneurs, executives, and managers is to build healthy, fast-learning companies. An organisation where people are comfortable speaking truth to power and arguing with those higher up on the org chart is going to do a better job spotting new trends early, and not getting held up by the worldviews of its most senior members.
Companies need an upgrade
That is why they invented Always Day 1 and the Netflix culture deck. Most companies still run like Windows 95 and are in need of an upgrade. The most important lesson is that the geek way to thrive in this faster-moving world is cultural not technological. It is all about norms or guiding principles. Many geek companies are excellent performers largely because of the cultures they’ve created.
The geek way
The geek way leans into arguments and loathes bureaucracy. It favours 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. The geek way is to work hard from the start to get the culture right and never stop working on that. The focus is also on providing healthy and desirable work environments. Replacing pointless hierarchy and structure with autonomy and freedom
Homo ultrasocialis
The geek way is rooted in a completely different perspective on evolution. Instead of survival of the fittest, we go ultra-social. Homo ultrasocialis. We humans have to be taught by others how to hunt, detoxify food, make clothing and tools, build shelter, and do many other things that are essential to our survival. We’re at a fascinating point in time right now. A critical mass of both kinds of curious people — how-asking tinkerers and why-asking scientists — have formed around questions of organisations, culture, and learning.
The geek norms
- The first great geek norm is speed
- The second norm is ownership.
- The norm is science. Conducting experiments, generating data, and debating how to interpret evidence.
- The fourth norm is openness.
Culture
The Big Nine cultural values, or the ones most cited by companies in their official values statements. They are (in alphabetical order) agility, collaboration, customer, diversity, execution, innovation, integrity, performance, and respect. Geek companies score high on diversity, have high levels of empowerment and autonomy and is highly supportive of innovation, agility, and execution.
The tips
- Farm for dissent.
- Be simultaneously rigorous and unstructured.
- Obsess about getting to the fundamental nature of things.
- Focus on excellence.
- Everything is data.
- You’re going to have a culture anyway — might as well build one you love.
- Normalise altruism.
- Observability increases adherence to norms and decreases plausible deniability.
- Focus the efforts on improving groups rather than individuals.
- Shape the ultrasociality of group members so that the group’s cultural evolution is as rapid as possible in the desired direction.
- Biases are features, not bugs, and you need to take them into consideration when you develop the culture.
- Strive to settle all arguments by empirical testing.
- Stop relying on HiPPOs and judgments of “experts,” set up an infrastructure for experimentation, and let it do its thing.
- When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
- Measure what matters.
- Apply chaos engineering.
- Rely on evidence to make important decisions.
- Introduce single-threaded leadership.
- Cross-team communication can be harmful because it often turns into a soft form of bureaucracy.
- Build a software architecture that devolved control to teams throughout the company, allowing them to access data and software without having to ask anyone for permission or support.
- Defensiveness is corrosive.
- Homo ultrasocialis are an intensely tribal species.
- Apply agile.
- A huge amount of evidence shows that our imitative learning is essentially constant and that it happens all across the range, from fully conscious, planned, and deliberate to totally unconscious.
- We’re more likely to copy from older people.
- Prestige is an important driver of learning.
- Make failure an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.
- If a schedule is long, it’s wrong. If it’s tight, it’s right.
- Constantly increase your clock speed.
- Maneuverability is the key to victory.
- Apply radical transparency.
- There are no undiscussable topics.
- Humility is a key cultural characteristic.
- The ultimate definition of a norm, then, is that it’s any behavior where noncompliance leads to punishment via social rejection. Status losses and social exclusion are as painful as a toothache or a broken heart.
Software is eating the world
Any company that thinks they’re not a software company is not long for this world because the agile way we’ve learned to build software is becoming the agile way we build everything. Many industrial-era companies simply can’t keep up with the geeks. These companies can’t update their software as quickly, which becomes a serious disadvantage at a time when software is eating the world. Competitors that can’t reduce their vulnerability by adopting the great geek norm of speed risk finding themselves feeling bewildered at how quickly their position has deteriorated.
Principles
“The geek way” confirms what many authors have written about before. The book to read is “Principles”. It all stems from there. Guiding principles as the basis for any company. This book adds wanting to be part of the norm as part of prestige and status.
AI-CEO
My own take is that if you combine citizen development and technology abstraction, culture will be the only differentiator. Combined with creating an authentic movement with a shared passion. It is the only way to compete with when digital twins will become the AI-CEOs of the future. The question is where geeks really stand on this.
