The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results

by Andrew McAfee

I can’t recall ever hearing any manager, geek or not, talk about many of the key concepts we’ll cover in the pages ahead: ultrasociality, prestige versus dominance, ultimate versus proximate questions, the press secretary module, and so on. I’ve also not come across any of these concepts in a business book written for a general audience (as opposed to an academic one). And while some concepts we’ll explore in these pages are more familiar, like plausible deniability, observability, norms, common knowledge, Nash equilibria, and the prisoner’s dilemma, they still aren’t given enough emphasis given how important they turn out to be. In short, the new science of cultural evolution hasn’t yet been transferred from university seminar rooms to corporate boardrooms and meeting rooms. It’s not what they teach you at Harvard Business School5 (trust me, I was there for fifteen years). The really exciting opportunity for me as the author of this book—and (I hope) for you as its reader—is to create a new understanding of some key business issues by bringing together theory and practice. Or, to be more specific, some new theory from the field of cultural evolution and some new practices from geek companies.