The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset That Drives Extraordinary Results

Geeks excel at more than just Dungeons and Dragons and fan fiction, according to this chipper treatise. McAfee (Enterprise 2.0), a research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, argues that a new generation of “business geeks” (“people who got properly obsessed with the hard problem of running a modern company”) have developed a corporate culture that improves upon the “established practices of the industrial era” by embracing four principles: openness (share information and be receptive to colleagues’ input), ownership (entrust workers with high levels of autonomy), science (conduct experiments on best practices and debate “how to interpret evidence”), and speed (test products or services frequently and quickly incorporate changes based on feedback). Case studies show these tenets at work, as when McAfee describes how the CEO of a marketing software company exemplified openness by accepting criticism about an employee education program from a young, recent hire without getting defensive. McAfee takes glee in discussing failed corporate initiatives (the short-lived streaming platform Quibi, which he faults for failing to test its product pre-release, serves as a punchline throughout) and stories about how executives at Google, Amazon, and Netflix benefited from adopting a more “geeky” culture offer insight into some of the tech world’s most recognizable companies. Business leaders would do well to check this out. (Nov.)