Their corporate culture often focuses on unconventional solutions to hard business problems.
The secret to success for many Silicon Valley tech companies isn’t necessarily that they’re ultra-nimble start-ups, or that they’re led by tech-savvy geniuses.says their success often has more to do with a specific type of corporate culture that focuses on finding unconventional solutions to hard business problems.
But Andy McAfee, a principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, corporate culture. One that is all about finding unconventional solutions to hard business problems.In this episode, you’ll learn why it’s important to center your company culture on norms rather than organizational structure.
Our viewers come from all over the world. And they work at everything from Fortune 500 corporations to fledgling startups, from family businesses to nonprofits. The aim of this show is to give insights for everyone as they navigate this transitional moment in how we organize ourselves in the business world.
ADI IGNATIUS: So, there’s a definition. Then, how do you define the Geek Way that you’re talking about in the book? What is the Geek Way? So really, the way you’re defining geeks, the way you’re defining Geek Way, I mean, it seems to be– I’m trying to think of other terms that we might have used, other coinages. Lifelong learner, but that’s not quite it. It’s people who nerd out on, in this case, management, right?
They shut down within 200 days of their launch. It was just a catastrophe. It was a completely digital enterprise. Netflix is a geek company. They follow all four of my great geek norms of science, ownership, speed, and openness. And I think the results speak for themselves. It’s incredibly common. And one of the things that I really think is powerful and respect about people like Reed Hastings at Netflix is he was able to build a business that got important decisions right when he, himself was wrong about them. And in the book, I talk about a couple of them. He was dead flat wrong about the utility of downloading to the Netflix app.
They might be in the right geographic location. But they’re not following the Geek Way, which is, again, about these norms and about creating a culture that is fast-moving, free-flowing, argumentative, autonomous, evidence-driven and pretty egalitarian. That’s the goal of the Geek Way. And Sergey and Larry in their garage trying to systematize our access to all the world’s information, these sort of great ideals– when they are actually running companies, they not only are trying to run a company great. They become killers, wanting to wipe out the competition, to foster monopolistic practices, to just grab up as much market share as possible.
I think, in general, for a lot of these companies, the competition is one click away. And is Tesla a monopolist in the auto industry? You simply can’t make that case. SpaceX has become pretty close to a monopolist in the rockets and satellites industry. And the three areas that I was most interested in were execution, agility, and innovation. And wow, the scores for companies clustered on the West Coast, clustered in Silicon Valley, clustered in industries that we call “high tech,” those scores are off the charts. There’s not any real competition for them.
And I brought this up to him. And he said, look, I was on Apple’s board for a while, I knew Steve pretty well. He said Steve was a tough person in all those ways. But he learned that if you want to stay on top, you have to listen to the people around you. You have to stop thinking that you have all the answers.
ADI IGNATIUS: I mean, one of the interesting things about Jobs, and certainly something he would say about– he would have said about himself, he did say about himself– was that he didn’t and that one shouldn’t slavishly follow the focus groups, that people don’t know what they want. Evidence is the queen here. And that’s what we’re going to follow. And a lot of the geek companies that I respect do that as naturally as breathing.and specifically when Satya Nadella came in to and kind of rekindle that early success and more. Talk a little bit about what he got right, particularly in the framework that–ADI IGNATIUS: No. Microsoft went from the tech company we liked least to maybe the one we like best.
And what he meant by that was, you can’t be the gatekeeper. You can’t say yes or no to other groups who might want to use it. So, with that one simple move, he said to the company, look, if the group wants to go grab all of the GitHub code to train up a model to help to provide assistance to programmers, you don’t have to ask permission.
The company is not a therapy group. It’s not there so you can sit around feeling vulnerable all the time. I was just wrong. Now, the company is not your therapy group. However, a company is a place– a successful company needs to be a place where it’s OK to be wrong, to fail, to not have the answer, to show that you’re uncertain.
Adi, Jack Welch’s autobiography was called Winning. And it was just kind of epitomized this industrial-era view of what you have to do all day, every day. I love the geek view, which is, hey, man, we’re going to launch some rockets. And they are going to blow up. ANDREW MCAFEE: I don’t think org structure is the key because the companies that I surveyed have very, very different org charts. They also have very different formal practices. Netflix is fairly famous for having the no-vacation-days policy. Amazon has extremely strict vacation policies for different levels of employee.
And then, openness, don’t be defensive. Be willing to pivot. Be willing to admit that you’re wrong. They show a little vulnerability. Those are the norms that are critical for the Geek Way. Which is, we are the only species that cooperates intensely with large numbers of people that we’re not related to. And we are the species that learns the quickest, that improves its tool kit, its technologies, its cultures most rapidly over time. Now, you can take that. And man, you can put that to work in a company.
ANDREW MCAFEE: Here are a few things you can start doing tomorrow that are extremely geeky practices. And I think they will get some traction. When you’re in charge of your group or you’re a team member or you’re leading a team, if you say things like, that’s a good point. And he said, the really natural tendency is for the people at every layer of the org chart to add something to that because they want to be part of the solution. They want to be part of this winning idea. And he said, by the time that idea gets back down to the originating team, it’s kind of unrecognizable.
ADI IGNATIUS: So, here’s another audience question. This is Laurie from North Carolina. And this is another very practical kind of question. How can organizations get leaders to unlearn the idea– who think that failure is bad? How do you–ANDREW MCAFEE: This is a super hard question. This is a super hard question. And I fall back on something that I learned from Clay Christensen– Adi, you know, the late, great scholar of management and organizations.
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