The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results

by Andrew McAfee

To prevent such a collapse, the business geeks take a radical step: they stop a lot of coordination, collaboration, and communication. It’s hard to overstate how big a change this is from the dominant approach of the late industrial era. When I was starting my academic career in the mid-1990s, business process reengineering was all the rage. This approach to improving performance was based on defining key business processes that cut across several functions (taking an order for a hundred widgets from a customer, for example, involved looking up inventory at the warehouse, having finance do a credit check, telling accounts receivable to generate an invoice, and so on), then specifying in great detail all the coordination required to make the process run smoothly. Reengineering and other approaches that emphasized cross-functional processes and well-defined coordination and collaboration were extremely popular. Executives loved the idea of having a tightly synchronized company that operated like an orchestra in which everyone was playing from the same sheet of music.