This is why geeks rule the world

Google, Amazon and Netflix are geeks

I’ve just finished the recently released (November 2023) “The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results” by Andrew McAfee, and it was a fantastic read!

The article will be a bit longer than usual, but I feel it’s my best so far :)

Who are the geeks?

A new generation of business leaders was born in the last decades - the Geek Leaders.

Geeks care about their passions a lot more than they care about mainstream opinion. As Dictionary.com puts it, a geek is “a peculiar person, especially one who is perceived to be overly intellectual, unfashionable, or socially awkward.”

Jeff Bezos embraced the unfashionable aspect of geekdom in Amazon’s 2011 shareholder meeting. In response to a question about how the company innovates, he replied, “Very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.”

Geeks aren’t concerned about going with the flow. They’ll go wherever their interests take them.

The Fourfold Path to Geekdom

The book covers the revolution happening in the 21st century, and how geeks created huge companies that completely changed the economy. McAfee claims that what made geeks so successful can be distilled into 4 norms, which he labeled ‘The Geek Way’:

1. Science - conducting experiments, generating data, and debating how to interpret evidence, instead of trusting experts.

2. Ownership - geek companies have high levels of personal autonomy and responsibility, fewer cross-functional processes, and less coordination.

3. Speed - achieving results by iterating rapidly instead of planning extensively.

4. Openness - sharing information and being receptive to arguments and changes in direction.

Netflix, Google, and Amazon are great examples of organizations that implemented those norms, and you’ll shortly see why.

1. The Norm of Science

The basis of a successful organization is making the right decisions.

The book introduced me to the term HiPPO - HIghest Paid Person’s Opinions, which I think is genius.

Geek companies don’t make decisions based on HiPPOs, but on data. While A/B testing is an old concept, Google was the first company to popularize it in the tech world, around 2000.

The concept is very simple - instead of debating and asking experts, just test any hypothesis on real data. Don’t know which color to use for the background? Choose a small segment of customers for each option, and see the results.

This article summarizes it amazingly:

Want to build a perfect website? Forget instincts - trust the data. Forget the designers - trust the audience.

Why is that so critical?

Because we think we know more than we do. A great example from the book:

…Neale [in a lecture] asks audience members to guess how many paper clips are in a small bottle.

She asks everyone to write down their best guess: “I want you to think of a range in which you are 95% certain that the number is going to fall between.”.

After a few seconds, Neale reveals that the bottle contains 488 paper clips. She asks how many people guessed that number exactly. No one did. Then she says, “How many of you got 488 in your range?” The surprising result: Maybe half.

Why did you miss my number 488 in your range? What was the characteristic of your range? Too narrow. What would a narrow range suggest? “I would be good at guessing paper clips.”

“You could have said one to a million! But no, you guys said, “I’m good at this stuff. I can guess those paper clips.” You guys are overconfident.”

Trivers and others have gathered a lot of evidence that we’re chronic self-deceivers:

• 93% of Americans in a small study say they drive better than average 🤦‍♂️

• At one company studied, 40 percent of engineers said that they were among the best 5 percent.

• Twenty-five percent of high school seniors believe that they’re truly amazing “people people”—among the top 1 percent in the ability to get along with others.

To sum up the first norm - don’t make decisions based on opinions, but based on facts.

2. The Norm of Ownership

Ok, so you made sure to follow the norm of science, and you made the right business decisions. Now you need to execute efficiently, by making sure people have the permission and ownership to make small decisions.

Ardine Williams was Amazon’s hiring person. Three months into the job she got a phone call from one of Amazon’s lawyers, calling about a potential problem. She recalls:

Amazon had recently secured several federal government contracts, which required some changes to the website. I went to a web developer who did the programming work to include that language on the site. He got it done.

Then I started looking for who had to approve it. This was in my first ninety days at the company, and I felt like I’d landed on Mars. I asked for advice from a senior colleague who had been at Amazon for a long time.

I said, “Who can approve changes made in Amazon.jobs? Is there someone to look at it and approve this?”
He responded, “Somebody already did—you. Why don’t you push the button and make the change?”

And honestly, I couldn’t answer the question. I called the developer and said: “Okay, push the button”. This was probably one of the hardest things I’ve done in my career personally because it was just so contrary to how I had grown up.

This is a HUGE shift from how companies operated in the 20th century. Take Netflix culture values as another example:

• Our policy for travel, entertainment, gifts and other expenses is five words long: “Act in Netflix’s best interest.”

• Our vacation policy is: “Take vacation.”

• Our parental leave policy is: “Take care of your baby and yourself.”

So up to now, we have 2 norms - science and ownership. You make the right decisions based on data, and you give your people the freedom to execute.

This already starts to feel like an organization I would like to work at.

3. The Norm of Speed

Now comes the part where you do the work. As we all know - Agile > Waterfall. We should iterate fast and adjust. This norm is explained in this funny research:

When Peter Skillman was working at the design consultancy IDEO in the early 2000s, he came up with a simple exercise for small teams. Each team has 18 minutes and:

• 20 pieces of spaghetti

• 1 meter of masking tape

• 1 meter of string (The physical kind. Not your coding type.)

• 1 marshmallow

The goal: build the tallest tower possible on a tabletop. The only constraints were that the tower had to remain motionless for three seconds after it was finished, and the marshmallow had to be on top.

Consultant Tom Wujec picked up Skillman’s marshmallow challenge and gave it to a wide variety of groups. In a 2010 TED talk, he summarized his findings:

• CEOs were a little better than average, lawyers significantly worse.

• The group with the shortest overall towers was business-school students.

• Kindergartners did better than the CEOs.

In fact, the only groups that did better than the young children were professional architects and engineers. And the children made by far the most interesting-looking structures.

Why are kindergartners so much better? “They just jump in and do it. They don’t sit around talking about the problem. they start with the marshmallow, and they build prototypes, successive prototypes, always keeping the marshmallow on top, so they have multiple times to fix when they build prototypes along the way… With each version, kids get instant feedback about what works and what doesn’t work.”

“Adults talk about it, figure out what it’s going to look like… then they spend some time planning, organizing, sketching, and laying out spaghetti. They spend the majority of their time assembling the sticks into growing structures. And then finally, just as they’re running out of time, someone takes out the marshmallow, puts it on top, and then they stand back, and—ta-da!—they admire their work.

But what happens, most of the time, is that the “ta-da” turns into an “uh-oh,” because the weight of the marshmallow causes the entire structure to buckle and collapse.

In “The Lean Startup”, Eric Ries advocates that entrepreneurs should act like kindergartners making marshmallow towers: they should make something quickly, get it to customers, get feedback from them about what works and what doesn’t, and integrate this feedback as they quickly make the next version.

We are almost there! So we made the right decision based on science, we gave people the ownership of the execution, and we made sure to deliver with speed and gather feedback.

What’s left?

4. The Norm of Openness

Be willing to accept you are wrong, especially as a senior leader.

McAfee recalls his experience in HubSpot, sitting on a meeting led by Brian Halligan, the CEO. A junior employee contradicted Hallingan, and McAfee was surprised to see that he calmly accepted it. He was open to the idea that he might not be right and might need to change his mind.

McAfee shares his own experience with the opposite of Openness - ‘Undiscussables’:

I’ve occasionally bumped into those undiscussables myself.

When I was starting out as a professor at Harvard Business School, we junior faculty got invited to the first of two meetings for deciding which job candidates, if any, to hire for the following year (the second meeting, where final decisions were made, was reserved for senior faculty).

When I first started attending these meetings, I offered my opinions and occasionally disagreed with my senior colleagues—the ones who would later be deciding whether I got to keep my job.

Eventually my mentor pulled me into his office and said, “Shut up in there.”

Good advice. I took it.

What he didn’t need to tell me was, “And don’t speak up at the next meeting to give some kind of J’accuse speech where you say that senior faculty are so defensive that they don’t want their opinions about who to hire challenged by junior faculty.”

I knew that topic was undiscussable. And that the broader topic of intrafaculty undiscussability was undiscussable, and so on.

I internally labeled the discussions in those meetings (and a few others) as no-go zones and kept my mouth shut. When I imagine being in a job where I’d have to do that throughout the day, every day, instead of just a few times a year, I feel despair coming close.

Final Words

Now you know how to build the dream organization.

• Step 1 - Science: make decisions based on data, not intuition or experts advice.

• Step 2 - Ownership: Give your people the freedom to execute, and don’t strangle them with processes

• Step 3 - Speed: move fast, release quickly, and gather feedback

• Step 4 - Openness: don’t have any “undiscussables” in your company. Make sure people know they are expected to tell things as they are, and not be afraid of reprucations.

Geeks rule 💪