Description: The Geek Way reveals a new way to get big things done and shows how to change the way you think about work, teams, projects, and culture, and give you the insight and tools you need to harness our human superpowers of learning and cooperation. "A handbook for disruptors." --Eric Schmidt What is "being geeky?" It's being a perennially curious person, one who's not afraid to tackle hard problems and embrace unconventional solutions. McAfee shows how the geeks have created a new culture based around four norms: science, ownership, speed, and openness. The geek way seems odd at first. It's not deferential to experts, fond of planning and process, afraid of mistakes, or obsessed with "winning." But it explains everything from why Montessori babies turn out to be creative tinkerers to how newcomers are disrupting industry after industry (and still just getting started). When all four norms are in place, a culture emerges that is freewheeling, fast-moving, egalitarian, evidence-driven, argumentative, and autonomous. Why does the geek way work so much better? McAfee provides an original answer: because it taps into humanity's superpower, which is our ability to cooperate intensely and learn rapidly. By providing insights from the young discipline of cultural evolution, McAfee shows that when we come together under the right conditions, we quickly figure out how to build reusable spaceships and self-correcting organizations. Under the wrong conditions, though, we create bureaucracy, chronic delays, cultures of silence, and the other classic dysfunctions of the Industrial Era. Mixing cutting-edge science, history, analysis, and stories that show the geek way in action, McAfee offers a new way to see the world and empowering tools for seizing the big opportunities of today and tomorrow.The Economist's Best Books of 2023 Forbes' Top 10 Business Books of 2023Financial Time' Monthly Best Business Books to Read Pick
Brief description:
Reid Hoffman is the co-author of six bestselling books, including the New York Times bestseller Superagency. He is the co-founder of LinkedIn, co-founder of Inflection AI, and a partner at Greylock. He serves on the boards of companies such as Microsoft and on nonprofit boards, such as the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. He is the host of the Masters of Scale podcast and as the Possible podcast. He earned a master's degree in philosophy from Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a bachelor's degree with distinction in symbolic systems from Stanford University. Greg Beato has been writing about technology and culture since the early days of the World Wide Web. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Wired, Washington Post, International Herald Tribune, Reason, Spin, Slate, Buzzfeed, the London Guardian, and more than 100 other publications worldwide.
Review Quotes: Juxtaposed to our outsized celebrity obsessed culture is the rise of a subtler but infinitely more powerful shift toward geek culture. The hegemony of geekdom in Silicon Valley and across the world is the underlying force that drives innovation and powers our economy. Andrew McAfee's The Geek Way is the guidebook for understanding this shift and navigating these turbulent times.-- "Richard Florida, bestselling author of The Rise of the Creative Class and The New Urban Crisis"