THE GEEK WAY

Solid business economics meets a nouveau-science insistence on quick learning and quicker cultural evolution.

McAfee, co-founder of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy and author of More From Less, describes an ethic whereby people “get fascinated by a topic and won’t (or can’t) let go of it, no matter what others think.” Gathering those kinds of people and getting anything done involves “cultural solutions, not technological ones.” One of them is a highly developed tolerance for chaos. Another is developing a thick skin when it comes to criticism, since these geeks are seldom hypersocialized and tend to speak their minds without filtering. McAfee examines numerous organizations that have built nonbureaucratic and—importantly—nonperfectionist cultures, such as Planet, a company launching satellites, radios, and cameras into space, with a new rocket shooting into near space every three months or so. Says one Planetoid, “we have an iteration time schedule that’s measured in months while NASA’s is measured in a decade or two,” a “pace of innovation” that hinges on the good-enough rather than the perfect. (So far, thank the stars, the good-enough hasn’t ended in catastrophe.) A similar emphasis on speedy action has resulted in Netflix’s supremacy as a streaming service as opposed to the ultra-cautious, now-extinct Quibi, which “was structured and run like a twentieth-century Hollywood studio.” Cautionary tales abound, since, as McAfee notes, the tendency to bureaucratize is always there to kill or discourage McAfee’s mantra-like insistence on “innovation, agility, and execution.” As much as anything else, he adds, a successful geek-culture enterprise will eschew emotion for science, which is empirically verifiable and whose terms are constantly argued over, hopefully without anyone being offended in the bargain. On that note, the author offers another mantra-like element to consider: “Reflect, don’t defend.”

A valuable guide for would-be economic, technical, and cultural disruptors.