The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results: McAfee, Andrew: 9780316436700: Amazon.com: Books

McAfee’s book is a breath of fresh air that brings several original perspectives on today’s start-up organizations and beyond. Highly recommended!

While so many business books have feel good phrases, this one has specific cultural norms and practices that managers can bring to their team. By focusing on certain norms over others, teams and companies can form cultures that outperform. Speed, ownership, science and openness are shown to outweigh the messiness that often makes us want to control, organize, gate keep and get buy-in. Dr M goes on to give specific tools to get out of the way and let your teams move in the right direction. A practical business book with evidence and actionable advice for allowing your people to actually get things done and fostering an environment where being a performer brings the respect of your peers. This one is a rare find.

Andrew McAfee identifies as a geek, and this book shows it. He understands geekness, and why it can be a good thing. Those who run companies "the geek way" have shown success in our rapidly changing business world. This book shows how adopting some geek principles can help any company in any industry do better. There are the usual anecdotes and the usual lessons learned from them. Plenty of food for thought and ideas to try out.That's why I liked the book. I've read probably a hundred books of this type, and it stands out as a good, albeit geeky, one.So why do I hate the book? The foundation the book is based on is faulty. On page 17 Andrew McAfee says that the research he draws on is "based on the theory of evolution, which is about as solid a foundation as there is in all of science." He then supports that statement by quoting non-scientist and Darwin-worshiper Daniel Dennett as saying, "If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of even Newton or Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law."But that's bunk. There is no unifying theory of evolution by natural selection in science. In fact, not once has Charles Darwin's idea of the origin of species by means of natural selection been shown. It remains theory, not fact. And it contradicts one of the most fundamental laws of science, the second law of thermodynamics. That law shows, based on statistical mechanics, that the endlessly iterative cycles of random genetic mutation and natural selection posited by neo-Darwinist theory could never lead to evolution but would instead result in degeneration.What should have been a key distinction in Andrew McAfee's book thus becomes muddled. He doesn't distinguish between optimization (which traditional companies do) and innovation (which geek companies do) but instead gets lost in the weeds of evolutionary theory.Biological evolution and business innovation are related, he got that right. But he needed to focus on micro-evolution and macro-evolution, and how that tracks with micro-innovation (optimization) and macro-innovation ("true innovation"). Instead he comes up with some just-so stories about how evolution created this and that in the human mind that obscure key concepts rather than clarify them.So I liked the book and hated it. But I am glad I read it. So should you.

I’ve read each book authored by McAfee along with virtually every paper he’s written. There are few whose writing and articulation of topics I enjoy as much as his. His own curious, original, and independent style of thinking MATCHED with his ability to synthesize a wide body of complex/dynamic ideas AND THEN deliver a unified theory in a clear, unique, and engaging writing style – is second to none. To sum up McAfee: A brilliant thinker… Always guided by interesting questions… Always extensively researched… Always clear in his delivery… And always practitioner-friendly (practical and actionable).In my own work, The Geek Way is particularly applicable. I help client organizations (executives and practitioner teams) identify how they might best incorporate technology to better compete now and in the future. Our engagements are most often initiated by executive teams approaching us frustrated (and often frantic) with the news that they’ve deployed $XXXM (often ranging hundreds of millions of dollars) into their digital transformation effort but that they haven’t captured value from those investments. Essentially, what began as an attempt to take a page out from the playbook of companies in the tech space to “be more innovative” has spiraled out of control. Those executives are then surprised (and often reluctant) when, instead of diving headfirst into the technology and attempting to perfectly map out what’s going to happen, we focus a majority of the attention on helping them rethink (and redesign) their organizational culture, organizational models (business and operating models), governance, etc. in order to harness the value of these technologies.McAfee understands what many executives struggle to understand and put into practice, which is: In most cases, it’s NOT the design and development of new technologies that’s holding them back. Instead, what’s often holding them back is a failure to design, build, and lead corresponding new/modern (and more effective) organizational cultures that support innovation, speed, agility, and execution simultaneously. Unleashing new technologies that are “bolted on” to classic, industrial-era corporate culture models is a recipe for disaster. In fact, the rate of change and innovation in these new technologies necessitates an upgrade to the standard corporate culture, a modern company that’s able to move faster and innovate more. In The Geek Way, McAfee provides the playbook to help executives build a modern organization and thrive in a faster-moving world.