“The Geek Way,” by Andrew McAfee

On this EconTalk podcast, Andrew McAfee discusses his book The Greek Way, which is about four cultural norms of highly innovative companies.

After listening the podcast, I bought the book and read it. I highly recommend it.

Here are the four cultural norms with a brief explanation.

Speed of iteration — Geek way companies try things at a frenetic pace, constantly learning from their trials and failures.

I call this an iterative, trial-and-error process.

I personally believe most of our lives fall into this type of process, but we don’t recognize it. Getting a job is an iterative, trial-and-error process. You write a resume, apply, network, interview and you don’t expect 100% success rate. Each iteration you tweak things along the way based on what you learn from each failure.

Dating is the same. Learning to walk and talk. School work, to a degree. You try a homework problem, see what you got right and wrong and keep iterating until you can do it right.

Ownership — In Geek Way companies, people are encouraged not only to have ideas but to take the initiative to try to prove them out, rather than just throw them over the wall to an innovation group or slot them through a bureaucratic review process that arbitrarily decides which things to try.

Science — How does your company settle disagreements? Geek Way companies prefer trying things over other methods, like Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.

Openness — In Geek Way companies, it’s safe to have and air opinions that are different from leadership.

I agree with these and highly recommend the book for anyone interested in innovation.

I lived a good A/B/A test of seeing a company — by accident — go from a typical large company bureaucracy with anemic innovation, to a Geek Way culture back to bureaucracy and anemic results.

During the Geek Way, it was fun, folks across the organization pitched in on things that weren’t necessarily on list of strategic initiatives, we iterated toward successes that are still in use in that company today, learned from failures and hit one big home run.

I can attest that it works.

I can also attest that it’s really difficult for bureaucrats to buy into it.

I do have a few nits of the book, two of which I will mention here and will save more for future posts.

McAfee calls it the Geek Way because this culture is common in tech companies, which are commonly founded by geeks. In some parts of the book it seems like he thinks this culture originated in turn of the century Silicon Valley due to certain factors, like the ability to quickly alter software code to iterate.

I think the Geek Way is common early on in successful startups dating way back. He even provides plenty of examples. It wasn’t clear to me whether he realized this or not.

Second, McAfee offers surveys for folks to rate their organizations on each of the norms.

If I gave those surveys to folks in bureaucratic cultures, I believe many would rate their company high.

“But we already do that,” is the most common objection I encounter when I pitch this culture. I believe that’s because they have no point of comparison.

For example, at the end of the speed of iteration chapter, a survey statement is how much do you agree with: “We have a short cycle time for delivering something?”

Many people I’ve worked with in bureaucratic organizations will strongly agree with this statement. When a project fails to be a commercial success, they even often cite as as success that we at least showed we could get something to market quickly.

Except that usually took 9 months to a year.

I’d re-write the statement from “we have a short cycle time for delivering something,” to “the typical cycle time from initial idea to initially getting it front of real customers in the marketplace is days or weeks instead of months or years.”

This gives them something to compare to.

People ingrained in bureaucracies would be more likely to strongly disagree with that statement.

Though, they would also try to tell you why that’s dumb. “We would not want to do it that quickly! That wouldn’t give us enough time to make sure the product is refined to our high standards.” Or, “There’s no way we can do it that fast and not risk big legal issues if something goes wrong.”

That they can’t imagine ways to overcome these objections and achieve such quick cycle times is part of why bureaucracies persist.

It doesn’t dawn on them that other companies, like Geek Way companies, have figured out how to overcome these and that might be part of the reason they do well.