The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results

by Andrew McAfee

Sitting at the same desk all day? Rotating through subjects according to the clock on the wall, rather than my interests? Covering concepts that I’d mastered years earlier? Doing mind-numbing drills and worksheets? This school didn’t feel like an educational institution; it felt like a reeducation camp designed to break my spirit.

If you look at 4-year-olds, they are constantly asking questions and wondering how things work. But by the time they are 6½ years old they stop asking questions because they quickly learn that teachers value the right answers more than provocative questions…

And the Prussian educators were in turn influenced by the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who was clear that schooling really should be about breaking children’s spirits. He wrote in 1807: Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished.

A bunch of geeks are now doing for companies what Maria Montessori did for schools. They’re reimagining them, improving them, and exposing false assumptions.

the organizations they’re creating are a lot less hierarchical, less rigid, less rules-based, and less top-down than those they’re outpacing.

The second major benefit of combining theory and practice is that we do a better job of sticking to new practices once we have a theory about why they work better—once we understand the first principles at work.

Things that make sense within our theories about how the world works are easy for us to take on board. Things that don’t make sense with our existing theories, on the other hand, are easy to reject.

the critical importance of not only being right, but also being able to convincingly explain why you’re right. The difference between the two states can be the difference between changing the world and losing your mind.

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.

“At NASA I was part of five spacecraft missions in six years. And that was considered prolific; most people do one or two in their NASA career. Subsequently, in the ten years of Planet, we’ve launched five hundred spacecraft on thirty-five rockets, with eighteen design/build iterations of the spacecraft concept. It’s a different pace of innovation.”

In 2014, Google estimated that getting the shade of blue right via the kind of testing that Bowman disparaged had led to an additional $200 million per year in ad revenue.

HiPPO, or “highest-paid person’s opinion.”

The first great geek norm, which is epitomized by Will Marshall’s journey from NASA to Planet, is speed: a preference for achieving results by iterating rapidly instead of planning extensively. Ardine Williams’s experience early in her time at Amazon illustrates the second norm, which 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.

norm of science: conducting experiments, generating data, and debating how to interpret evidence.

great geek norm, which is openness. Halligan convened an open discussion of his proposal, was open to being challenged by a subordinate, and (most critically, I think) was open to the idea that he might not be right and might need to change his mind.

The geek way, then, is about speed, ownership, science, and openness.

In the geek way, speed doesn’t mean velocity; it instead means the cadence at which a company can iterate. Speed refers to how quickly a team can build something, get it in front of a customer or otherwise test it in real-world conditions, get feedback, and fold that feedback into the next version.

Ownership is closely related to autonomy, empowerment, and devolution.

One thing to point out at the start of our exploration of the geek way is that it’s simultaneously rigorous and unstructured.

where innovation, speed, and flexibility are the keys to success, consider throwing out the orchestra and focusing instead on making a different kind of music.”

“Empowerment” and “autonomy” are two of the most common buzzwords in business writing. But they’ve been a lot easier to find in articles and books than in actual companies.

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Some companies can successfully execute the strategies they come up with. Some can’t. The differences between these two types are largely cultural.

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.

the healthiest corporate cultures are the ones with the highest levels of freedom, trust, responsibility, and accountability.

the geeks take all these dials and twist them as far as possible in the same direction—the one that fosters norms of science, ownership, speed, and openness, and that creates a fast-moving, freewheeling, egalitarian, evidence-driven, argumentative, autonomous corporate culture.

moving the dials toward the center is not an idea to be lightly tossed aside. Rather, it should be thrown away with great force.

“90 percent syndrome”: everything appears to be on track and on time until the project is 80 to 90 percent finished, at which point progress suddenly slows to a crawl.

A 2020 study of over five hundred large US companies found essentially no correlation between stated corporate values and actual culture as assessed by employees.

In the United States full-time workers spend, on average, just about as much time each week at work—forty-seven hours—as they do asleep.

The misery comes not when you have a job, but when you’re afraid you might lose it.

“You’re going to have a culture anyways—might as well build one you love.”

Increasing observability and decreasing plausible deniability are core to the geek way,

Making cultural evolution as rapid as possible means compressing the time it takes you to launch your spaceships, or whatever you’re launching. Innovate more. Improve faster. Become more nimble. Make your customers happier. Operate with greater efficiency and reliability. Get higher productivity growth

“You have been through ethics training; therefore you are now a highly ethical individual.” In other words, the training could provide moral licensing—permission to behave badly under cover of the self-deceptive belief that you’re a good person.

Argumentation is how we distinguish good ideas from bad ones.

The first rule of healthy debate is to focus on the issue and not make personal attacks.

Goodhart’s law, which states that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

A team that believes in A/B testing just about everything, and that sets up an experimentation platform to do lots of tests and continually incorporate the results into its offerings, is going to be good at execution.

Our minds are inherently justificatory about their own ideas, and argumentative about the ideas of others.

Status is central to the lives of many social animals.

Charlie Munger says, “Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.”

More employees seeking management slots led to more managers, more managers led to more meetings, more meetings led to more memos, and more red tape led to less innovation.

“Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”

Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp… The process is not the thing. It’s always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us? In a Day 2 company, you might find it’s the second.

“I found that the key was agility, agility, agility. We needed to develop speed, nimbleness, and athleticism to get the consumer experience right, not just once but daily. We needed to set and repeatedly meet short-term goals, shipping code at a more modern, fast-paced cadence.”

So one of the fundamental things we do is in any project review, we look at not just what was the input and the output but also the speed of the input-to-output iteration.”

If the most prestigious people around us start acting differently, we’re likely to mimic this new behavior, even if we’re not always aware that we’re doing so.

Remember, our intelligence is highly justificatory; we effortlessly come up with reasons why our ideas and actions are righteous, whether or not those reasons will pass muster with our Sunday school teacher, rabbi, priest, or ethics professor.

“Working software is the primary measure of progress,”

“Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done,”