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Coming up next on Passion Struck.
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At the heart of the book is a different set of practices to bring people together and accomplish big things.
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I think The Geek s most fundamental innovation has nothing to do with digital technologies.
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I think they have iterated and experimented their way into a better set of practices, all centered around bringing us weird human beings together and letting us accomplish really, really important things.
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Welcome to Passion Struck.
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Hi, I m your host, John R. Miles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world s most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.
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Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.
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If you re new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays.
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We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes.
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Now, let s go out there and become PassionStruck.
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Hello, everyone.
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Welcome back to Episode 370 of Passion Struck, consistently ranked by Apple as the number one alternative health podcast.
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And thank you to all of you who come back to the show every week to listen and learn how to live better, be better, and impact the world.
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If you re new to the show, thank you so much for being here.
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Or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or a family member, we now have Episode Starter Packs, which are collections of our fans  favorite episodes that we organize into convenient playlists that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show.
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Either you can go to Spotify or passionstruck.com slash starter packs to get started.
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In case you missed it earlier in the week, I interviewed retired United States Army Staff Sergeant and New York Times bestselling author Travis Mills.
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Travis is not just a war hero.
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He is one of only five quadruple amputees to survive the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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His journey from the battlefield to where he is today is nothing short of awe-inspiring.
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In our interview, we discussed his latest book, Bounce Back, 12 Warrior Principles to Reclaim and Recalibrate Your Life.
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I also wanted to thank you for your ratings and reviews.
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And if you loved today s episode or the one I did with Travis, we would appreciate you giving it a five star review and sharing it with your friends and families.
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We now have over 21,000 five star reviews on Apple podcast alone.
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And I know we and our guests love to see comments from our listeners.
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Today, I am incredibly excited to be joined by Andrew McAfee, author of the enlightening new book, The Geek Way.
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Andrew is the co-director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and a principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
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In our interview today, Andrew unpacks the essence of what it means to be geeky, debunking common misconceptions
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revealing that at its core, being geeky is about embodying a spirit of perennial curiosity, facing challenging problems head-on, and embracing unconventional solutions with open arms.
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During our discussion, Andrew introduces us to the unique culture crafted by geeks centered around four pivotal norms.
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Science, ownership, speed, and openness.
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This geek culture might seem odd initially.
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It doesn t prioritize expertise, detailed planning, or fear of making mistakes, nor is it focused on winning at all costs.
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Yet, this culture is responsible for everything from the creativity we ve seen in children who experience Montessori education to the disruptive forces reshaping industry after industry.
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So when these four norms converge, what emerges is a dynamic, egalitarian, evidence-driven, and autonomous culture that s not afraid to engage in spirited debate.
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But why does the geek way prove to be such an effective approach?
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Andrew provides a compelling answer, tapping into the fields
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cultural evolution, and collective human intelligence show us that under the right conditions, humanity s innate ability to intensely cooperate and rapidly learn can lead to incredible achievements, such as reusable spaceships and self-correcting organizations.
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On the flip side, the wrong conditions can lead to the dysfunctions of the industrial era, such as bureaucracy and chronic delays.
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So without further ado, let s discuss the geek wave with Andrew McAfee.
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Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.
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Now, let that journey begin.
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I am absolutely thrilled today to welcome Andrew McAfee on PassionStruck.
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Welcome, Andy.
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John, it s good to be here.
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Thank you.
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Andy, as you and I were talking about at the beginning of the show, our career paths have interesting parallels with both of us starting in management consulting.
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Reflecting on your time at McKinsey, can you share some of the key lessons and foundational experiences you gained there that have been pivotal in shaping your career trajectory?
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I never worked at McKinsey.
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I worked at a small boutique operations management consulting company called PRTM right out of my MBA, which I did at MIT.
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And I wandered around and started looking at companies and trying to help them operate better.
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And I think that started me down this path of
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wondering broadly why it s so common for companies to get jammed up and why they all seem to get jammed up in some of the same ways and why they become disheartening places to work over and over again.
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And then if there s a better way and if we have any evidence, if there are any demonstrations of a better way to run a company, which if all the management literature is to be believed,
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would probably also be a more fulfilling environment to work in.
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And the geek way this is, oh my heavens, this is 30 plus years after I started my career, I think it s finally my answer to that question.
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Okay.
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Well, I love that.
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And I can t wait for us to go further into your book.
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I wanted to ask you a couple of background questions to allow the audience to get to know you a little bit better.
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Andy, you re the co-director of MIT s initiative on the digital economy.
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Can you tell us more about the IDE and how its mission of how we thrive in a period of profound digital transformation is taking shape?
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And that was exactly the founding question of the IDE.
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So I came back to MIT.
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I did my undergraduate and my master s degrees at MIT in the late 17th century.
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It was a while ago.
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And then I did some other things with my career, including teaching at Harvard Business School.
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And I came back to MIT in 2009.
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And I had a couple of colleagues.
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I had Eric Brynjolfsson, a really fantastic economist and a great guy to collaborate with, and David Varel, who was the executive director of our center at the time.
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Again, just a wonderful guy.
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The three of us really tried to figure out what we wanted to do differently.
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And if we needed to reconfigure things at MIT,
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so that we could focus on this question of what is all of this technological progress doing to the business world?
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How is it transforming the business world?
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And that was the founding question of the IDE, which is part of the business school at MIT.
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And then over time, the interests keep morphing.
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Technology keeps on doing interesting things to the business world.
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Just look at where we are with generative AI.
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And eventually I started to think about the company itself and what kinds of companies are able to survive and thrive in this really just very fast changing turbulent environment full of disruption.
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It s very interesting.
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As I was doing my own MBA studies, I remember taking this class at Wake Forest and this was probably in the mid 2000s.
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And the professor had us do this exercise where we looked at the Fortune 500 in 1970, looked at it again in 1980, 1990, 2000.
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And it was shocking that about 50% of the companies no longer existed.
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Do you see this is going to be an even more rapid change?
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to what was already a rapid change back then?
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Absolutely.
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And in particular, if you look at all of the competitive battles that we ve witnessed over the past, let s call it 30 years, the web sprung into our consciousness in 1994.
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Let s round it off and call it 30 years ago, we ve had 30 years of business in the era of the web.
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And when I say the web, we can include on that all the subsequent technologies.
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Think about the smartphone.
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Think about machine learning.
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Think about generative AI.
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But 30 years in this time of technology-fueled business change, and I
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I want to divide up all the competitive battles that we ve seen.
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I want to oversimplify a little bit and talk about them as competitive battles between the upstarts.
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We can use terms like web native or digital companies or disruptors or whatever, or new economy versus the incumbents, the industrial era, the stalwarts of the industrial era.
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Again, I m oversimplifying, but we got 30 years
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of battles, where the upstarts come into a sector, come into an industry, and want to shake it up, right?
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And of course, the incumbents don t want those upstarts to succeed, they want to maintain their dominant position, market share, valuation, whatever.
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So we ve got 30 years of those battles.
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In how many of those battles
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have the incumbents either beat back the upstarts, made them go away, or held steady.
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My list is bizarrely short.
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My list is bizarrely short there.
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Over and over again, we ve seen the upstarts come in and just make mincemeat
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out of the incumbents in sector after sector, and I think that list of sectors is growing.
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So we can already put consumer electronics and retail and advertising and print journalism.
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More recently, I think we can add film entertainment to that.
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Think about how profoundly
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the streaming revolution pioneered by Netflix has upset the incumbents in Hollywood, which is a really longstanding, very stable oligopoly for about a century.
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We can now, I think, start to add automobiles to that list.
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The incumbents are being deeply shaken up.
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I think we can add all the incumbents in the space industry to that list because they re being left behind by the innovations coming out of the upstarts.
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So I think we re just in the early innings, we re in the early stages of a deep change in the economy, very broadly speaking, not just because these upstarts are better at harnessing the latest technology, they are, they re also better at doing most of the other things that you need a company to do, to pivot when necessary, to improve their operational efficiency, to innovate even at scale.
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These upstarts, I call them the geeks, these upstarts are demonstrating that they can do that
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better than the incumbents that they re leaving behind.
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I think the geeks are just getting warmed up.
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And I think unless the incumbents of the industrial era wake up to what s happening and start rethinking things in a pretty deep way, they re just going to continue to get disrupted, and they won t really understand why.
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Yeah, it s interesting.
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I m going to just take you back to my time as a senior executive at Lowe s.
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And we had a very strong technology function, very much respected in the sector we were, retail.
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However, one of the biggest issues that we faced was our CIO at the time, Steve Stone, who I still think is one of the best CIOs I ve ever worked for, was head and shoulders thinking about what the company would look like in the future.
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And we were trying to
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implement this project where we would have one single view of the customer and be able to interact with them any way that they wanted to shop with us and be able to recognize, understand what their buying patterns have been and tailor our needs to it.
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And as we started building out this project when I was there, I can t tell you how many times we heard from the CEO, the CFO, etc.
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that we are not a technology company, we are a retailer.
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Yet, if you look at companies like Amazon,
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And many of the others who are leading the way today, the way that those companies work is yes, Amazon has this retail presence, but ultimately it is a big data company and technology driven and everything they do, which allows them to bring about these other products in much more compelling ways and to compete right out of the gate where others don t have that ability.
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Do you think there s truth to that?
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I do, but let me rephrase that a little bit, because I think things have shifted.
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Back in the era you were talking about, I could imagine the CEO of Lowe s saying, hey, we re a retailer.
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I started keeping track of how many CEOs have recently said just the opposite.
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They ve admitted, they ve fully accepted that they run technology companies now.
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And you hear this, I m going to try to rattle off my list of CEOs who have said this, the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, Fidelity,
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Allstate, Bank of America, Walmart, Under Armour, pretty senior executives at most of the auto companies.
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And the one that, just when I thought I couldn t be surprised anymore, surprised me.
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The CEO of Domino s Pizza is now saying that he runs a technology company.
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So the word has gone to the executive suites and gone to the boardrooms that we re all technology companies now.
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However, what I think is really interesting about what you brought up is that when it comes time to do a project that is as conceptually simple as let the customer interact with us
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with all of their data and all of their convenience via any channel that they want.
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That s really easy to say.
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It s hard to argue with.
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Why do so few companies still succeed at pulling that off?
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There s something about their culture, something about the way things get done or don t get done in their organization that jams that product up in project down up and keeps it from succeeding.
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And the reason I got excited and the reason I wrote the geek way is I think there s a group of companies out there.
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They re primarily young.
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There are
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concentrated on the west coast of the United States, but that s not what s important about them, that are better able to execute those kinds of important efforts, and they get jammed up less.
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And that s a big part of the reason why they re just taking market share, taking market cap from the incumbents in industry after industry.
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If you look at where
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value has been created in public companies in America.
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It s striking.
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I went and ran the numbers and since the turn of the century, one-third, fully one-third of all of the market cap gains of all the public companies in America come from companies headquartered in Silicon Valley.
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One-third out of that tiny piece of real estate.
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Now part of it is that the economy is
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using a lot more technology in Silicon Valley s, the technology producing headquarters.
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But again, I m going to use my example of Netflix.
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Netflix is not a technology producing companies.
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They make entertainment.
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They make shows that we want to watch.
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They re a lot closer, the same kind of company as HBO or Disney.
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And yet those companies have not been as successful at responding to Netflix s innovations as Netflix has.
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So I want to comment on two things that you brought up.
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One is, I think you re absolutely correct on culture.
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I can t tell you how many digital transformations I ve been part of where everyone in the company looks at the digital transformation to be a technology-led initiative when every single time it is a business-led initiative and culture is the number one thing that gets in the way because people will have to change how they work.
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fundamentally to make this change advantageous for the company.
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The other thing I wanted to bring up is what Lowe s tried to do.
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We were spending about a billion dollars to do it.
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Home Depot just tried to do this project called One Home Depot, which is basically the same thing.
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And they were spending what s been reported to be over $8 billion to do it.
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And part of the reason that these large
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legacy companies have so many issues is the underlying systems architecture, process architecture, and data architecture that they ve been built upon.
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So we called it at Lowe s a spaghetti architecture because you had thousands of these proprietary applications that you had to go in and tweak to get any of this stuff to work.
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And unless you build those foundational architectural layers, it makes these things extremely difficult to do.
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And a lot of times the business doesn t have the patience to wait for this stuff to get done.
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Whereas some of these new entrants like you re talking about can disrupt the whole thing because they re building
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everything from scratch.
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It s finding yourself in the gutter, wanting to rebuild your life.
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You have to do it brick by brick.
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It s the same thing that they have to do in these companies.
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So a lot of words there, but what I wanted to understand is you ve talked about what inspired The Geek Way, but it might seem strange to be discussing The Geek Way on a podcast that s in the health and wellness category and really about self-improvement.
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So I wanted to ask, who is the audience for this book and why should our listeners be paying attention to this topic?
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Because what is at the heart of the book is a different set of practices to bring people together and accomplish big things.
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I think the geeks most fundamental innovation has nothing to do with digital technologies.
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I think they have iterated and experimented their way into a better set of practices, all centered around bringing us weird human beings together and letting us accomplish really important things.
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Let me try to make that concrete.
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I got a lot of insight from learning about the research in a new discipline that goes by a bunch of labels.
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The one that I like is called cultural evolution.
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And I m going to give my version of what this discipline focuses on.
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They try to answer a really fundamental question.
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Why are we human beings the only species on the planet that launches spaceships?
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Nothing else is close.
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And there s science fiction about other species doing this, but we don t really expect it.
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You and I do not expect the chimpanzees or the octopuses or the termites to launch a spaceship.
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They re just not going to do it.
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They re not anywhere close.
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There s an interesting question there, like, why not?
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What is so special about us?
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And the first answer that I hear from a lot of people, and I think it s an interesting answer, there s some truth to it, but it s fundamentally not the right answer, is it s because we re so smart.
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Yeah, okay, we re actually really dumb in some ways.
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So when this discipline called cultural evolution looks at how we humans are able to build spaceships, they say it s not really our big individual brains.
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It s the fact that we can come together in great big groups, cooperate really intensely, and learn very quickly.
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And to me, that was the big aha moment.
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If we focus on that, if we focus on what we human beings are really good at,
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Then we do a couple of things.
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We become less fond of our own intelligence because our brains are actually weird and miswired.
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If we just look at ourselves as super intelligent, what we re really good at is coming together as a group and cooperating and accomplishing big things and learning quickly.
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And once you internalize that, once you start to believe that, then you behave differently yourself.
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And then I think you can accomplish more and bigger things in your life and in your career.
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So you covered one of the two superpowers that you discuss in the book, and that is intense cooperation.
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I m currently reading another book, Limitless, again by Jim Quick, and he s constantly talking about the need for continuous learning and improvements.
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How does that continuous learning interplay with intense cooperation?
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you learn via the cooperation.
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And let me make that as concrete as I can.
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It turns out that reading books and learning from classrooms and doing laboratory experiments, these are all really recent human innovations.
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And we over-focus on them.
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We humans have been learning from each other for as long as we ve been a species.
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And we had a huge amount of progress in cultural evolution before the scientific revolution came along.
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So how do we do that?
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And the research is actually shedding a lot of light on this.
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And what it shows us is that what we humans do is look around us all the time.
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When we re learning to hunt or learning to close a sale or learning to cook food doesn t matter.
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We look around us all the time.
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And we create a weighted average of the best examples that we see around us.
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We do this both consciously, but primarily subconsciously.
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And when I say best, what we humans are really good at is figuring out who to learn from.
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And we focus on three types of signals or cues.
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We focus on age.
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Elders have been around a long time.
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They picked up a lot of knowledge.
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We focus on success.
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If I see someone just
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absolutely doing a great job, I m more likely to focus on them.
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And we focus on prestige.
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In other words, I look at who everybody else is looking at.
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And I learned from that person, because there s a reason everybody s paying attention to them.
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So we humans primarily subconsciously focus on age, success and prestige.
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And then we create a blended model of all the learners that we see around us and all the models that we see around with.
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And that s how we get better over time.
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The other thing that s really important about that is we get better generation by generation.
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And I don t mean generations of people, generations of trying something.
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Iterating is probably a better word.
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we get better with each cycle, with each opportunity to do something, get feedback on it, look around us, incorporate what we re seeing, try something again.
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Did it work?
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Were we successful?
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No?
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Great.
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Let s try it again.
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So this helps me understand why the geek way works so much better.
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The geeks have this huge fondness for rapid cycles iterating.
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That s the whole base of agile software, agile development, agile approaches to managing a project.
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What that does, and we re not sufficiently aware of this, we don t emphasize it enough, is it also automatically increases the rate of learning because you re getting more feedback and you re getting more chances to learn from the people around you.
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So that s one of the great geek superpowers.
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And once you realize that, then I think you change the way that you work to make the work more visible and to have faster cycles of feedback, which means faster cycles of learning.
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So what I m hearing from you, Andy, is that you believe innovation is enabled in large part via focus on speed and learning through doing.
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Speed in a very particular way, not how fast everybody s working or how hard they re working, or do they think they re making progress?
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No, it s iteration.
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It s the cadence of the work that you re doing.
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And the heart of Agile, once again, is setting up a iteration cycle where you build something, you get it in front of a customer who gives you feedback, or you expose it to reality.
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Did this rocket blow up or not?
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and then you learn from that and then you go do it again.
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If you bring people together, if you work in public, and if you iterate as quickly as the circumstances will allow, that unlocks the learning potential that we have.
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That s always interesting.
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When I think of what you were just saying, I think of SpaceX and how as Elon Musk was getting started and had these disastrous launches, if you would have asked him, he would have told you he expected those to happen.
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And he was doing it almost on purpose because each time one of them would blow up, he was getting incrementally better at understanding what needed to be done next in the next iteration.
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I think he s won.
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Yeah.
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He s absolutely explicit about that now, right?
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And to be clear, SpaceX has never lost an astronaut.
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They have not blown up a crewed mission.
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But the way you get really good at building a spaceship that will take astronauts to the ISS and then eventually the moon and maybe Mars is by iterating, by building a lot of rockets and by tolerating that they will blow up at different places.
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Now, Elon and his team would probably prefer it if the early prototypes didn t blow up, but they re willing to tolerate that kind of very valuable feedback.
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Meanwhile, NASA and the other incumbents in the space industry continue to have this extraordinarily upfront planning heavy, things can t go wrong, cover every single contingency for every single thing that we do.
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And when you look at the evidence, SpaceX is blowing past them.
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SpaceX is the only American organization that is certified to take astronauts into space.
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They are the only organization in the country
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that can take our own human beings up into space and that gets permission from the government to do that.
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That s fascinating.
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SpaceX is a 20 plus year old company from a standing start.
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They re the only ones who have done that.
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They re the only ones who have built commercially viable, reusable solid fuel rockets, and they ve reused them over 100 times by now.
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And let s not forget, they are the only organization in the world
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that was able to deploy thousands of rugged, reliable, high bandwidth satellite internet terminals to the Ukrainian armed forces after the Russian invasion.
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I look at things like that and I think, what have the incumbents in the space industry been doing?
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When SpaceX comes along and shows us that you can do this from a standing start in 20 years, you can do all of these things, I start to get really unimpressed with the legacy incumbents in that industry.
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I don t think that s the only industry where we re going to see the geeks just race past the incumbents.
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I m glad you brought that up because what is very interesting is if you look back at when they were phasing out the space shuttle and they were launching these new components, they were looking at a crude aspect of it and a cargo aspect of it.
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And SpaceX was the only company that decided instead of just engineering for one, they would do both simultaneously.
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But what people don t understand is when they were awarded the contract, they were awarded 25% of the money.
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Boeing was given 75% of the money at the same exact time.
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And you can see now, look at the difference between where the two programs are.
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And another thing just.
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Let me just emphasize that point.
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SpaceX has completed, I believe, nine or more missions for NASA, crewed missions for NASA, and some for other organizations as well.
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Boeing has yet to have its first crewed test flight.
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As you point out, they got their contracts at the same time.
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And I m not sure about 7525.
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But NASA s contract was significantly bigger than SpaceX s.
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I just at the risk of repeating myself, a bunch of geeks have figured out a better way to get big things done.
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And unless the incumbents realize that and start copying from the geek playbook and following the geek way, we re going to continue to see these really lopsided results.
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Yeah.
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And just to emphasize this in a way that might be meaningful for people is I just interviewed former astronaut, Mike Massimino.
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Sure.
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And he was telling, yeah.
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And Mike was telling me that after he s an MIT guy, of course you do.
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So he was telling me that after they had done the whole shuttle program, they did this analysis and it was engineered as I understand it to have one fault per a hundred launches.
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And what they actually found.
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was that it was about one in 76.
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And I think about if I knew that one out of every 76 times an airplane was going to go up, it was going to crash.
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Would I get on that thing?
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Absolutely not.
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And you look at what SpaceX has done and now they re into the hundreds of launches.
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So great point.
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These results are really lopsided.
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And we see this over and over again.
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When Netflix announced its intention to put streamed entertainment out there and to produce and create its own entertainment, Hollywood laughed at them.
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This was so presumptuous.
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The head of Time Warner said when he was asked about it, he said, it s a little bit like, is the Albanian army going to take over the world?
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That was his quote.
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He said, I don t think so.
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Okay, what is now Time Warner, I think it s called,
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Warner Brothers Discovery is the company that s out there.
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It s been through a bunch of management changes.
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It s now publicly traded.
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I believe it s worth about $25 billion.
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And Netflix right now is worth something much closer to $175 billion.
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It s a more valuable company than Disney now.
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The incumbents are going to keep getting surprised until they realize what they re actually facing.
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SPEAKER_00
Andy, you talk about being geeky in a different way that a lot of people would probably relate to it.
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Can you discuss being geeky in a way where you can talk about the four norms that are central to geek culture?
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Yeah.
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And my literary agent who s worked with me and my colleague, Eric Brynjolfsson on a few books, Raphael Sagolin, he s the guy that spotted it because Eric and I had written a couple paragraphs about this geeky leadership style.
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We just use that word.
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And Rafe said, oh no, that word describes something.
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What you re telling me is that there is a new style of running a company and that deserves more
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focus and more attention than it s getting.
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And you just found the right word for it.
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This is the word that you have to claim and make your own.
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And I thought that was great advice, hence the title of the book, The Geek Way.
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And like you point out, I m using it a little bit differently than is common.
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For me, a geek is any person with two characteristics.
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First of all, they get obsessed with a tough problem.
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I don t care if it s memorizing Star Trek trivia or getting really good at tasting wine, or in this case, figuring out how to run a company successfully.
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They get obsessed with a really hard problem.
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They can t let it go.
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And then number two, they are willing to embrace unconventional solutions.
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If their answer, the answer they come up with,
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doesn t fit in the status quo, isn t quite mainstream, they don t care.
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Like Jeff Bezos says, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.
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So for me, a geek is any obsessive maverick.
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That s the phrase that I use.
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And when I looked at what the business geeks had been doing, as you point out,
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I kept on seeing these norms that were common across very different companies.
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So for example, Netflix and Amazon are really dissimilar companies in a lot of ways.
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But they do follow these four norms that I talk about in the book, which are first of all, science, we ve talked a bit about that.
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Second of all, a norm of ownership, you are responsible, we re not going to burden you down with bureaucracy and all kinds of cross cutting coordination, you have to communicate with everybody.
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No,
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go do your thing.
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The third norm is one we ve talked about, it s speed, it s iterating quickly and getting feedback.
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And the last one is the norm of openness, which is, we ve talked about it a little bit, being open, not being defensive in the face of challenges and evidence that you re not doing the right thing, or that your guest didn t turn out to be the right one.
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So for me, what the business geeks have settled on is building cultures that have these four very strong norms.
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of science, ownership, speed, and openness.
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And they manifest in all kinds of different ways, but the geeks are adamant about all four of them, and they work to maintain them and help them stay strong, even as companies get older and as they get bigger.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s interesting.
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In the book, you lay out a number of studies.
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One was a 2020 study of over 500 large U.S.
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companies that found essentially no correlation between stated corporate values and actual culture as assessed by employees.
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And there have been further surveys that have consistently found that no more than half of employees and sometimes less than 10 percent, shocking, know what is expected of them on the job and how their work aligns with their company s goals.
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How do the geeks do things so much differently than those who ve come up using the industrial age playbook?
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They follow these four norms, which help combat exactly those kinds of dysfunctions.
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And I was trying not to cherry pick the statistics, but when you look at how employees of industrial era companies, what they think of their cultures, are they bureaucratic or not?
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People say they re hugely bureaucratic.
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I just, I m hemmed in all over the place.
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They, it takes a very long time to get things done.
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Do I know how my work fits into the overall goals and strategy of the organization?
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Like you point out, depending on the survey, 10 to 50%, no more than 10 to 50% of people say, yeah, I know how my work fits into what the overall company is going.
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And people report a lot of hypocrisy that the slogans on the wall or the first page of the annual report doesn t bear a lot of relation to what s actually going on at the company.
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And so these norms of science, ownership, speed, and openness are designed, I think, to get at those dysfunctions and just to try to reduce them over time.
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The norm of ownership, for example, comes along with this process of making sure that everybody knows they have a great deal of autonomy, but they also have to know how their work
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aligns with the overall goals of the organization.
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So the geeks hate bureaucracy, but the companies that I looked at have an alignment process and alignment bureaucracy that makes sure that everybody can answer that question.
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Yes, I know why my work fits in with what s going on.
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And to deal with bureaucracy, again, they just have these cultures of decentralization, devolving authority pretty far down, high levels of responsibility and authority.
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And when you look at what employees of these companies report, they do report that things are not the same as they are in these old-fashioned organizations.
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So the geeks aren t perfect, and they have to keep fighting against these dysfunctions.
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But their cultures are designed to counteract them.
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And you talked earlier about how digital transformation efforts usually get bogged down because of culture.
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Think about that for a minute.
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That is an unforced error.
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Our friends who follow soccer instead of tennis would say, that s an own goal.
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There s no excuse for having a corporate culture that is the biggest barrier
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to innovating and getting important things done.
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You re responsible for your culture.
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That is a thing that you can control.
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And if you ve got one that runs counter to your purposes, you don t have anybody to blame but yourself.
3
SPEAKER_00
One of the funniest things, I shouldn t call it funny, but I always thought it was amusing that on many of these groundbreaking projects or programs that I would lead in these large corporations, they would actually move us out of the corporate headquarters into another facility that was completely separate.
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So we wouldn t be influenced at all by the current culture that was going on.
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And that s a disheartening strategy, right?
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And what the admission there, the unspoken admission is we can t change this culture, so we have to move you out of it.
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SPEAKER_01
And again, one of the reasons that I think Nadella s performance at Microsoft is so extraordinary, and we can learn so much from it, is he didn t try to set up a separate Microsoft skunkworks that was going to revitalize the whole corporation.
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He just revitalized the whole corporation.
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And I ll repeat myself, Microsoft was a bureaucratic, sclerotic mess and its people were disheartened and they did not see Nadella as any kind of white knight when he came in, but he has accomplished amazing things by what I would say is following the geek playbook.
3
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely.
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SPEAKER_00
Can you talk about some of the most prominent companies that reflect the geek way that listeners may relate to?
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and because the geek way was largely born in Northern California, largely born in the tech sector, they re going to be companies that they are Netflix, they are Amazon, they are the payments company stripe, they are SpaceX and Tesla.
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But they re not all found in Northern California.
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If we go up the highway to Seattle, you ll find both Amazon and today Microsoft SpaceX is actually headquartered down in Southern California, which is interesting.
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Southern California is one of the
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centers of the aerospace and defense industry.
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And there are a few startups in the defense sector that are following the geek playbook and really growing very quickly.
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Andoril is one you might have heard of.
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They went from founding to getting their first billion dollar contract from the government, I believe, in five years.
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This is pretty extraordinary and fast performance.
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But the geek way isn t only found on the West Coast.
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I
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spend some time talking about the software company HubSpot, which was founded and headquartered in my part of the world, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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I interviewed their CEO, Yamini Rangan, who took over after Brian Halligan, the co-founder and the long-term founding CEO, stepped aside and talked to her about how do you sustain an already really strong, really geeky culture.
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So the geek way is all over.
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And there are tons of companies practicing elements of it that I m not aware of right now that the world is slowly getting geekier, because it works better in the competitive environment that we call business.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, who would have ever thought that we all want to be geeks someday?
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SPEAKER_01
I have found that most people warm up to that phrase, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
We ve all got something that we re geeky about.
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We all, we re usually obsessive about something or other and geek is no longer automatically perceived as an insult.
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I ve also found that people as they really want to be energized by their work instead of disheartened by it.
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There s a ton of research that I cite in the book.
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SPEAKER_01
We spend a lot of time at our jobs.
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Americans spend a lot of time at their jobs, a little bit more time than we spend asleep, more time than we spend with our partner, almost as much time as we spend with our kids.
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And I don t have to tell you, we get a lot of meaning and dignity and value from our work and community.
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Our work is really important to us.
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And I think what the geeks have figured out is how to build companies
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where they allow people to feel energized and valued, and they have the opportunity to learn and contribute, and they re not disconnected from everything else.
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People want that feeling.
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And I was surprised to learn this.
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Research shows that most people, if they won the lottery tomorrow, would not quit their jobs.
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And you might think, well, that s true for people with super elite jobs.
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It s actually people lower on the education and the skill ladder who are least likely to quit their jobs.
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Work gives people value and dignity and meaning, and they would love to work in a place that helped them with all those things instead of just disheartening them.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it reminds me of that famous Steve Jobs quote that I can t quote by heart, but basically he said, work is going to make up the majority of life.
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SPEAKER_00
So you better enjoy what it is that you re doing in that life.
4
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And Dharmesh Shah, one of the co-founders of HubSpot talked to corporate leaders and he said, look, you re going to have a culture anyway.
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You might as well have one you love.
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I think that s a great insight.
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Every company has a strong culture.
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It might not be by design.
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It might not be the one that the people at the top of the org chart want.
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It might be one that they want to change, but companies, just simply because there are so many people spending so much of their waking lives at this organization, these organizations have strong cultures.
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There s really not an excuse for not having them be strong, healthy cultures.
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SPEAKER_00
So if you went back to the origination of the geek way, who do you think were some of the people most instrumental to this new approach?
4
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I talk about this in the introduction to the book.
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For me, the patron saint of the geeks actually isn t Nikolai Tesla or Thomas Edison or Steve Jobs.
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It s Maria Montessori.
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And a lot of us have heard of Montessori schools.
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These were the schools that she founded.
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She was an Italian educator a little more than a century ago.
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And she tried to figure out the problem that she dived in on as a geek was how do young children learn best?
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And in best geek fashion, she got obsessed by that problem.
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And she embraced unconventional solutions, because the classrooms that she came up with didn t have a grid of desks, they didn t have a teacher inflicting each subject on the room of students all doing the same thing at the same time.
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They re just these laboratories where you walk around self paced, self guided, and you play with things and by playing you learn.
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And that sounds nice.
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It sounds like this hippie style of education.
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But if you really want your kids to be good at reading, writing and arithmetic, this is not the approach that s dead flat wrong on a story kids do just fine on standardized tests and all the other things that we use to measure education, but they don t have that creativity squelch out of them.
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And
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Barbara Walters a while back interviewed both founders of Google, both Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
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And she said, okay, what s the secret here?
4
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And both of them said, we were Montessori kids for the start of our education.
4
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And that approach of you kids study what you want, dive deep, learn, ask questions about nature, just be geeky yourselves, and you will carry that with you.
4
SPEAKER_01
Man, I love that.
4
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Montessori believed that we overbuilt education.
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There was too much structure.
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There was too much hierarchy.
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It was pointless.
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It was getting in the way of what education was supposed to accomplish, which was learning among children.
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And for that reason, I think she s just the patron saint of the geeks.
4
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And it s no surprise that there s a thing called the Montessori mafia in tech.
4
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A lot of pretty prominent people in tech went to Montessori schools or similar kinds of schools, and they learned to keep asking questions and stay energized by learning.
4
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instead of finding that kind of disheartening.
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So she s my geek patron saint.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, if you think about it, a lot of the things I ve read point to Rockefeller as one of the key architects of the modern education system that we use in the United States.
4
SPEAKER_00
And a lot of that was geared towards keeping people in the middle class and to this whole manufacturing and corporate type of ecosystem.
4
SPEAKER_00
So a lot
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needed tons of routine workers in the industrial era, we needed those people.
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And maybe the education system that was dominant was good at turning out people who could do routine work all day.
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We don t need as that kind of worker as much anymore.
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I can go a little bit darker than that.
4
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Because it turns out that a lot of the educational pioneers in America looked to Prussia, which was the one of the first
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countries in the West to set up what we would call a standardized educational system, put all the kids through it, make it mandatory, make it go through childhood.
4
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The Prussians did that.
4
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They were influenced by this one philosopher who was really explicit.
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He said the goal of education is to drive the free will out of children so that they ll be good, obedient citizens for the rest of their lives.
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SPEAKER_01
Okay, yipes.
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I don t sign up for that.
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I m much happier signing up for the Maria Montessori view of what we should be doing with small children, awakening their love, their curiosity, their love of learning.
4
SPEAKER_00
Another thing you cover in the book is you mentioned that the geek way is not deferential to experts and doesn t prioritize detailed planning.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I think about my time in Fortune 50s, which really was about trying to find the subject matter expert.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it was all about detailed planning.
4
SPEAKER_00
Can you explain why this is so important and its benefits to the geek culture?
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, there are two different things going on there, and you brought both of them up.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s not that planning is bad, it s that the default is to do too much of it.
4
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And when you overplan, you re just being overconfident.
4
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And you re thinking, I know the state of the world, I know the state of reality, the state of nature, I m just going to plan my way through it to get to a good outcome.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, man, nature and reality are really tricky places, you probably got something wrong.
4
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And the only way you re going to learn that is when you go out into reality, when you go out into nature, when you go out and figure out and put something in front of a customer and say, Is this working for you or not?
4
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So the reason that I lean against planning, not is not that planning is
4
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bad idea or it s unnecessary.
4
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It s that by default, we do too much of it.
4
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Danny Kahneman, who s the first non economist ever to win the Nobel Prize in economics, thinks that there s a planning fallacy.
4
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We just are way too confident we over plan.
4
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The geeks have internalized that.
4
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And so they
4
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try to not do away with all kinds of planning, there s some minimum viable plan out there.
4
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But then get out into reality, get out into nature, get out and talk to a customer, give them something and iterate focus less on planning, and more on iteration.
4
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The other thing is, I
4
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When I talk about the geek way, I sound like I m anti-expert.
4
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And that s not the case.
4
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Experts are there for a reason.
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We experience people are very valuable to have.
4
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The problem is when you can t question their judgment, because it turns out that experts are wrong a lot, just like the rest of us are.
4
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Now, maybe they re less wrong about the things that they re expert on, or they do have that knowledge.
4
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But their batting average is very far from perfect.
4
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And their decisions and judgments and predictions have to be subjected to scrutiny and debate and argumentation and challenge, just like anybody else s do.
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So the kind of expert that I m resistant to is the one who says, here s what we re going to do.
4
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And I don t want any backtalk about it.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s a great way to roll out new Coke in what was it 1984 and 1985.
4
SPEAKER_01
This gigantic fiasco exactly came because overconfident people at the top of the organization said, Wow, the formula for Coke is losing the Pepsi challenge.
4
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We re going to roll out new Coke.
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Those kind of fiascos you get when you are too differential to the experts to the people at the top of the org chart.
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Yeah, boy, do I remember that?
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What a colossal mistake that was.
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People have trouble remembering that.
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It was almost 40 years ago.
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That is a thing that happened.
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At the flick of a switch, Coke retired the formula for Coke, which had been around for, what, 80 years or something at that point, and said, here s a new Coke.
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It tastes more like Pepsi.
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And they didn t even anticipate the pushback that we d get.
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It was crazy.
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Andy, you and I have been talking mostly about U.S.-based companies.
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How does the geek culture in the U.S.
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compare to that of China, and what implications does this have on the present and future competitive landscapes of these two global powerhouses?
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I am not a China expert, so I can t speak with authority on this.
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One thing that I do understand about Chinese companies, especially Chinese tech companies, is that they are very fond of this iterative approach.
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They don t sit around and plan forever.
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They build stuff and they follow this more agile approach to making things.
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That s as far as I m willing to go to compare and contrast.
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American tech companies versus Chinese ones.
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It s just not something that I m qualified to say more on.
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However, I think the evidence is pretty clear that the more authoritarian a society gets, the more that their economy gets centrally planned.
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the less real innovation we should expect from them.
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So when I see Xi s efforts to centralize control of the economy, to try to direct it, he s just, I think he s innately hostile to these idea of really free Western-style market-oriented economies.
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As a member of Team Liberal Democratic West, that makes me a little bit more confident.
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I think
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that s a path to long-term slowdown in your capacity to innovate.
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Yeah.
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Well, it s no secret that many of the best known entrepreneurs in China, after they launched these incredible companies, seem to just get sidelined and taken out of their own companies.
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So definitely something to be said with that.
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Yeah.
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Let s talk about something a little bit different.
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There are a lot of changes happening in the industrial technology sector, a sector that has a term, if people aren t familiar with it, called the titanium economy.
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And this is a very important sector for the future of all of us.
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How do you see companies leveraging the geek way to catalyze what McKenzie refers to as the great amplification cycle, ultimately transforming the landscape of manufacturing?
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Yeah, the geek way is scale independent.
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You can start doing it at your startup.
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In fact, it s more natural at a startup.
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Startups are inherently more egalitarian.
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They are inherently more iterative because they re trying to figure out what their minimum viable product is.
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And does the customer want this at all?
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And they don t have a ton of bureaucracy built up.
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They re very young companies.
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Now, the challenge is, as you point out, as you start scaling up, the tendency is for those things to
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vanish, or for those things to recede, and for process to take over, and hierarchy to take over, and bureaucracy to take over, and planning to take over, and the experts to start making the important decisions, and the geeks push back against most of those things.
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It s not that they don t want any coordination, but again, I think this idea of a minimum viable product, let s extend that.
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The geeks believe in a minimum viable plan, and they believe in minimum viable process as well.
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And so carrying that forward as you pass through different stages of growth, as you enter what our colleagues at McKinsey would call the titanium economy, and try to keep growing past that to become a legitimately big company, one of the ways to mess that up
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is to start following the industrial era playbook for how you re supposed to behave as you become a larger company.
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And that industrial era playbook says, look, you need more coordination, you need more structure, you need more hierarchy, you need more planning, you can t keep operating like
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six people at a little bitty startup.
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And the geeks say, watch us.
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They say, that s exactly what we re going to try to do.
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And we realize we need minimum viable process, minimum viable plan.
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We understand that.
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But what we don t want is to lose that energy of we are going to go for it.
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We re going to sit around and argue about what the evidence is telling us.
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And we are going to try stuff and figure out as quickly as we can, if we re headed down the right path or not.
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And we are really going to try to maintain this culture where I feel comfortable speaking truth to power speaking truth up the org chart.
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And my colleague Amy Edmondson at Harvard, it s got a great book out now called the right way to fail, I believe, but she keeps talking about this fundamental concept of psychological safety.
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Are you comfortable?
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Are you in an environment that makes you feel comfortable speaking truth to power, the geeks try very hard to maintain that environment, even as you grow up and become a bigger company.
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Whereas if you re focused on winning and you re defensive and you re protecting all the time, psychological safety is very rare.
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And we had Amy on the show about two months ago.
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So audience definitely go back and check that one out.
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Yep.
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She s great.
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Andy, I wanted to make this real for the audience.
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And today, many of the people who are listening are individuals trying to focus on self-improvement.
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They re young professionals.
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Some might be in middle management, people working in everyday office jobs, parents.
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My question to you is, can anyone be a geek and use the geek way secret sauce?
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We all are geeks, we all have things that we are obsessed about.
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And in particular, we re all members of this very weird, very unique species on the planet.
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And once you realize that you realize what our amazing superpowers are, and what our limitations are.
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So let me make that concrete.
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One thing that everybody can start doing tomorrow that will be incredibly helpful.
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is saying to somebody, hopefully somebody that they trust or somebody who is somewhat knowledgeable, here s my idea.
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What do you think?
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And not saying that and expecting praise back or saying it in such a way that praise me, I ve had this idea.
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No, no.
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What do you think?
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What am I missing here?
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Because other people are bizarrely good at evaluating our ideas.
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We re very good at evaluating their ideas.
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we re terrible at evaluating our own ideas.
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So get feedback early and often.
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And instead of having this inherently defensive posture of, I know I m right, and I m going to find ways why I don t need to listen to your feedback, you open up, you re going to learn something if you take feedback on board.
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The other thing you can do, which is again, it s a little bit
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counterintuitive, is instead of sitting around and thinking how great your idea is, go out there and stress test it, build something, see if it works or not.
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Mentally, the mantra should be, I think, plan less, iterate more.
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And then as a way to show that you re a good colleague, other people want to work with, just start saying things and meaning them.
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Start saying things like,
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That s a great idea.
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I hadn t thought of that.
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Thank you.
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That s really valuable.
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I m going to rethink things now.
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Just start feeling like you can be more open.
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Just fight this tendency to be overconfident and to be naturally defensive, and to keep trying to preserve the status quo.
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Those are deep tendencies in all of us.
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And the geek way is a way to get past them and to start making faster progress.
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Well, great.
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Well, Andy, as we wrap up, if a listener wants to learn more about you and what you re doing, where s the best place for them to go?
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So in addition to the book, the geek way, I ve got a Twitter account and I am a fairly active presence there.
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So that s a McAfee, A M C A F as in Frank E E. And I ve got a website, andrewmcafee.org.
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Those are ways to keep up with whatever is top of mind for me.
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Okay.
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And I enjoyed reading more about IDE and you also have a Medium page as well on the Medium platform where you post your articles.
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I m going to launch a Substack as soon as I get around to it.
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It s on my minimum viable plan.
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So hopefully I ll be shooting my mouth off on Substack soon.
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Okay.
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Well, that s great.
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Well, Andy, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
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It was such an honor and congratulations on your great new book.
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It s been fantastic.
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Thanks very much.
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I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Andy McAfee, and I wanted to thank Andy and Little Brown and Company for the honor and privilege of having him appear on today s show.
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Links to all things Andy will be at the show notes at passionstruck.com.
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Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show.
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And speaking of books, my brand new book, Passionstruck, at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever you purchase books.
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And in it, I will explain how you can create your most intentional life by providing you 12 powerful principles.
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Videos are on YouTube at both JonRMiles and PassionStruckClips.
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Please consider supporting those who support the show.
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And I have a brand new quiz that is now available for you to take where you can find out where you sit today across the PassionStruck continuum.
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You can find it at PassionStruck.com.
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You can sign up for my newsletter, Work Intentionally on LinkedIn.
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You can catch me at JonRMiles on all the social platforms.
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And you can sign up for my other newsletter, Live Intentionally, also at PassionStruck.com.
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You re about to hear a preview of the PassionStruck podcast interview that I did with Jim Quick, who s the founder and CEO of Quick Learning, New York Times bestselling author of his book Limitless, a speed reading and memory trainer and host of the number one QuickBrain podcast.
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You know how there s personalized medicine based on your genetics or personalized nutrition based on a test like your microbiome?
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Well, we created a model for personalized learning because everybody learns a little bit differently, right?
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They have a different style based on their brain animal, and that informs how they could read better, remember names, learn another language, focus when they need to, and so much more.
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It literally affects every area of your life.
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The fee for this show is that you share it with family or friends when you find something useful or interesting.
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If you found today s episode with Andy McAfee interesting on the geek way, then definitely share it with those who could use the message that we gave here today.
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In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen.
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Now, until next time, go out there and become PassionStruck.