Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Political economy
Weblink
https://andrewmcafee.org/

THE GEEK WAY

Andrew McAfee

The Radical Mindset Transforming the Future of Business

The biggest story in the business world has been hiding in plain sight until now: the company has been upgraded, but not for the reasons you think. In this groundbreaking book, Andrew McAfee explains why The Geek Way works so much better than what came before.

In looking into what makes today's most innovative companies distinct, McAfee saw a hidden revolution, focused on culture. To capture its unconventional and radical nature, he took an old term and made it new: Geek. The business geeks have arrived, and they do things very differently. This book shows why they're just getting started - and will change the future.

Some of these geeks are well-known: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Reed Hastings. Others less so, but they're transforming industries ranging from space exploration to finance to online marketing. Their approach to building and maintaining thriving organizations revolves around four habits: science, ownership, speed, and openness.
When all four are in place they yield organizations that are more freewheeling, fast-moving, egalitarian, evidence-driven, argumentative, and autonomous than the stalwarts of the Industrial Era. They're also better performers. They excel simultaneously at innovation, execution, and agility, and are some of the most sought-after places to work in the world.

Why does the geek way work so much better? McAfee provides a totally original answer: because it taps into humanity's superpower, which is our ability to cooperate intensely and learn rapidly. By providing insights from the young discipline of cultural evolution, McAfee shows that when we come together under the right conditions we quickly figure out how to build reusable spaceships and quantum computers. Under the wrong conditions, though, all we create are bureaucracy, chronic delays, cultures of silence, and other classic dysfunctions of the Industrial Era.

Today's business geeks are farthest along in figuring out how to create conditions that harness our superpower. This book will help you figure out how to go even farther.

THE GEEK WAY is a business book like no other: a paradigm-shifting framework that will forever change how you think about success, and show how anyone can adopt the scientifically-backed geek habits that produce extraordinary results.

Andrew McAfee is a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-founder and co-director of MIT's Initiative on the Digital Economy. He studies how technological progress changes the world. Prior to joining MIT Sloan, McAfee was a professor at Harvard Business School. He has also served as a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. McAfee received his doctorate from Harvard Business School, and completed two Master of Science and two Bachelor of Science degrees at MIT. He speaks frequently to both academic and industry audiences and has taught in executive education programs around the globe. He is the author of MORE FROM LESS and the coauthor of the New York Times bestselling THE SECOND MACHINE AGE.

Available products
Book Published 2023-11-14 by Little Brown
Book Published 2023-11-14 by Little Brown

Comments

Video interview of the author by the Harvard Business Review on How the Geeks Rewrote the Rules of Management Read more...

Andrew McAfee will also be taking part in a global Web Summit in November, which will take place in Lisbon. Read more...

Andy understands that we haven't just been creating new technologies in Silicon Valley - we've also been creating new ways to run a company in a world permeated by tech. Here he distills what we've come up with. This book is a handbook for disruptors.

By combining management theory, competitive strategy, the science of evolution, psychology, military history, and cultural anthropology, McAfee has produced a remarkable work of synthesis that finally explains, with a single unified theory (which he dubs "the geek way") the reasons why the tech startup approach has taken over so much of the world.

UK: Macmillan UK ; Brazil: Alta Books ; Korea: Chungrim ; Polish: MT Biznes ; Vietnamese: Bizbooks

In industry after industry, corporate boards are asking management what their plan is to thrive in an unsettled, fast-changing environment. The Geek Way contains among the best answers I've seen to this critical question.

I've worked closely with Andy for more than a decade, I'm still blown away by this book. It's bold and original, relevant and rigorous, and immediately useful for any restless, curious innovator. In other words, for any geek.

I can see dead companies. They're the large incumbents who still run themselves as if software isn't eating the world. If you'd rather lead the transformation than be consumed by it, start putting this book's insights into practice as quickly as you can.

Solid business economics meets a nouveau-science insistence on quick learning and quicker cultural evolution. McAfee, co-founder of MIT's Initiative on the Digital Economy and author of More From Less, describes an ethic whereby people 'get fascinated by a topic and won't (or can't) let go of it, no matter what others think.' Gathering those kinds of people and getting anything done involves 'cultural solutions, not technological ones.' One of them is a highly developed tolerance for chaos. Another is developing a thick skin when it comes to criticism, since these geeks are seldom hypersocialized and tend to speak their minds without filtering... A valuable guide for would-be economic, technical, and cultural disruptors.

Juxtaposed to our outsized celebrity obsessed culture is the rise of a subtler but infinitely more powerful shift toward geek culture. The hegemony of geekdom in Silicon Valley and across the world is the underlying force that drives innovation and powers our economy. Andrew McAfee's The Geek Way is the guidebook for understanding this shift and navigating these turbulent times.

The Geek Way makes a fascinating case that the most important technological revolution of our time isn't what companies make, but how they're managed. Andy McAfee is a world-class intellectual provocateur - he never ceases to challenge my assumptions and sharpen my thinking - and reading this book will do the same for you. It's the most compelling analysis I've seen of what Silicon Valley has learned about building more effective organizations, and what they still have to learn.

How fast can you find out you are wrong? This is the predictive metric of success in Silicon Valley. Mcafee explains why the leaders who build organizations that will help everyone who works there learn really quickly whether they are right or wrong will win in the new economy. And he shows why the leaders who allow their success to dampen their eagerness to hear about it when they are wrong have sown the seeds of their own failure. Essential!

The chapter titles alone - which intrigue and baffle in equal measure - should compel you to read this smart, irreverent, informative guide to navigating the future of work. Companies that don't follow The Geek Way, according to Author Andy McAfee, will fall behind. And it's all about creating the right culture. Yup. Culture. I bet you didn't see that coming. A culture of speed, ownership, science, and openness. Each of these simple words contains more than you can know, until you read this remarkable book.

This volume in McAfee's stable of books will be a welcome addition to business collections in academic and public libraries.