Review: The Geek Way by Andrew McAfee
The book focuses and explores in depth the key traits of successful companies like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft etc. It differentiates four main areas: ownership, openness, speed, and science. From all four openness is mentioned as the key to all other features as it naturally enables them.
For myself, I summarize the book as two aspects: environment, and speed.
The company needs to focus on creation of an environment where ideas can move freely, basic needs like access to code (including changing the code), data, documentation, support easily available. In addition to that negative feedback not only welcomed but actively sought so any issues can be discovered as soon as possible so they do not become too large of a problem. This requires an atmosphere where people are not punished for mistakes and so there is no implicit incentive for covers up.
The speed part is about not moving fast by forcing people to work more under pressure etc but rather about optimizing process for quick iterations through testing hypothesis, and ideas so good ideas are quickly adopted and the bad ones are immediately rejected. And it is crucial to apply the same principle at all levels from low-level coding to high-level customer facing product ideas because a delay at any level will result in delays for the whole organization. And bureaucracy is the largest and the most invasive demon, a company needs to fight as it tends to naturally reoccur from the human nature constantly seeking for gaining higher status.
As status games are a large part of human nature it interferes a lot with the attempts to build an efficient organization as one of the easiest ways to gain status is through bureaucracy, gatekeeping, injecting yourself in “important” meetings, and be constantly update by others. The reason for that is the fact that the status from the evolution standpoint is a measure of probability to be evicted from the tribe as well as path to access to more and better resources. So it wouldn’t be a surprise to say that loss of the status, for example, due to sudden organizational changes can be perceived as an existential threat and can lead to depression or higher suicide rates.
There are different way how companies deal with it in some cases they try to eliminate a possibility to gain status through gatekeeping, and bureaucracy like in case of the shared company wide code base introduce by Nadella in Microsoft. Or by channeling the status in some way that benefits the company rather than harms, like, gaining for prestige as an expert in a field so people are seeking for your opinion without because your opinion matters and not because they force to like in bureaucracy.
After reading the book and talking to a few bright people from different companies, by an accident not by intent, I imagine successful start up mindset type of companies as an blue ocean full of all sorts of fishes of all colors, and shapes. In that ocean they form schools, and free to migrate. There is plenty of food and the water is so clear that you can see many groups of fishes around you, the food, and the danger from miles away. The other types of organization are like aquariums standing in a large gloomy hangar, there the food is scares and you don’t see danger behind the glass an inch from your nose and even if you do see the danger, there is nothing you can do, you are in a aquarium after all. No way to escape.
To conclude, the book is must read. Amazon like: The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results
From this book you will know:
- how bureaucracy and status are connected
- why you can think of scientific methods as of manifestation of arrogance or overconfidence channeled for common good
- why agile development works and how it is related to air combat strategies and the liar’s club
- why Amazon uses Day 1, two-pizza teams, and single threaded owners and how it is related to changes in Microsoft and the leadership of Nadella
- and more.