The Geek Way by Andrew McAfee

If you’re working in a cult of personality where the loudest opinion wins and the most important thing is to keep your boss happy, this is an important read. 

The author examines the culture and process that has made technology companies so successful in the last 20 years and describes an environment that is very different from the rigid hierarchies of the 20th century. These new companies have become huge, but they tend to keep their organizational structures as flat as possible by using small teams focused on very clear measurable goals. They work hard to avoid the chiefdoms and departmental structure you might associate with a huge manufacturing company. The only way to achieve this is to spend considerable energy on creating non-ambiguous goals that can be measured and providing the room for small autonomous teams to pursue them. 

Another good read on this idea is Team of Teams by General McChrystal where he talks about changing the culture of special forces after seeing the agile nature of terrorist cells they were fighting in Iraq. He encourages breaking down barriers and empowering a team that can be fed by two pizzas to get the whole job done on their own instead of expecting relevant orders to work their way up and down the chain of division > battalion > company > platoons > squads. All of this thinking is very important to understand in our modern world where there is so much information and the pace of action is so fast. 

McAfee goes on to offer some more nuanced thinking around how to set yourself up for success in this model. SOSO: Science, Ownership, Speed, and Openness are the core values he finds across all the organizations using this decentralized approach to make a huge impact. Science meaning everything you do must be clearly measurable so even senior leadership can feel comfortable acknowledging that some of their “decisions from the gut” aren’t always slam dunks. Ownership in being willing to give small teams the faith and access they need to make big changes quickly. Speed is important because knowing not all plans will work well. You need to be able to implement, assess and pivot as fast as possible until you see a win. Openness meaning all metrics should be shared by default, or how can you have the Science part working. This last one feels a little redundant to me, but we’ll come back to that. 

As a whole, everything the author talks about is pretty non-controversial at this point and if your organization isn’t embracing this approach you’re likely falling behind or soon will be. 

My one disappointment with this book may seem petty, but it nagged me the whole read. The word “Geek” is not an attractive term. Yes, he quotes Bill Gates saying if Geek means such and such he’ll proudly wear the label, but that feels strained to someone who grew up in the 80’s and perhaps has had that term thrown at them without then turning into the world’s richest man. A Geek, in those days, was a pimply social outcast who spent too much time learning a useless skill that had limited social value. Nerds were good at math and science. Geeks were into D&D and comic books. 

The idea that McAfee is going to reclaim this negative word as a rallying flag for a generation of new leaders feels hopeful at best to me. I run an organization full of people McAfee would likely love to write about, but no part of me wants to go into a sales pitch saying “well I’m a card carrying Geek with a team of Geeks who love Geeking out together on big ideas to solve your problems.” I appreciate that McAfee is acknowledging the way we do things works well, but I worry the label is instinctively “othering.” 

Who really wants to be a geek? It’s easy to imagine someone reading this and thinking this approach to work will be forever alien to them because fundamentally “I’m just not geeky enough.” In the same vein but opposite direction, I worry it grants permission for antisocial behavior and a disinterest in self improvement from independent contributors who may happily identify a “geek,” deliver outsized results on their projects, and show no interest in developing empathy for others. 

I recognize that harping on a label misses the larger point of the book, but labels do matter. I keep coming back to the idea of “Openness” that McAfee ends on, and I posit that would be a better label for this style of organizational management. Science, Ownership and Speed all require Openness to work at all, so using it as a 4th virtue just to make a catchy acronym out of SOSO seems strained. (Although I recognize SOS is taken ;) Telling my staff or prospective clients that we strive to run an “Open organization” and we’re looking for “Open thinking” and we believe any capable individual can learn to be more “Open” feels far more compelling than using the word ‘Geek.’ 

Who doesn’t want to be a little more “open” to opportunities, possibilities and growth in life? If “The Open Way” could convince an organization that openness was the road to success, that would feel pretty compelling to this geek.