One of the examples in your book of geek culture triumphing is Microsoft, and specifically when Satya Nadella came in and rekindled that early success and more. Talk a bit about what he got right, particularly in the framework that you’ve created.
ANDREW MCAFEE:
Can you think of a more impressive corporate turnaround story in living memory?
ADI IGNATIUS:
No. Microsoft went from the tech company we liked least to maybe the one we like best.
ANDREW MCAFEE:
And if you were an investor, you really didn’t like it for about a decade. The stock price was flat as a corpse’s EKG. And then Nadella took over, and it’s become one of the most valuable companies in the world. It’s an astonishing comeback story.
I got to interview Nadella for the book. He’d made brilliant strategic moves, a bunch of them. You have Microsoft embracing open source, wow.
But I was interested in the cultural changes that he made. And he did a couple things that I think are straight out of the geek playbook. Some of them are obvious. He embraced agile development methods as widely and quickly as possible inside Microsoft. He did a couple things to reduce the sclerotic bureaucracy that was in place at Microsoft, which was just hamstringing their ability to do anything important out there in the world.
One of the brilliant things he did was say, “Look, you cannot own a digital resource inside Microsoft. You cannot own the data. You cannot own the code.”
And what he meant by that was you can’t be the gatekeeper. You can’t say yes or nomor to other groups who might want to use it. With that one simple move, he said to the company, “Look, if the AI grup wants to go grab all of the GitHub code to train up a type to help provide assistance to programmers, you don’t have to ask permission. Just go do that, subject to all the right constraints and safeties on it.” Man, that is an astonishingly good bureaucracy-reduction mechanism.
Maybe the deepest thing that Nadella did was that he pulled off this amazing feat of helping Microsoft become a less defensive organization. What I mean by that was, he said in his interview with me, “We had a culture where it was not OK to be wrong, to show any weakness, to not hit your numbers, to not be the smartest person in the room.” He said, “We just had that culture and it had to change.” He did a number of really brilliant things to move from a culture of defensiveness to a culture of openness.
When I used to hear this word, “vulnerability”, in connection with leadership or business, I thought it was just a buzz phrase, hand wavy, nonsense business. 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 successful company needs to be a place where it’s okay to be wrong, to fail, to not have the answer, to show that you’re uncertain. Nadella helped get Microsoft down that path, and it was an absolutely fundamental thing to do.
I also interviewed Yamini Rangan, who’s the CEO of HubSpot here in Cambridge, who took over a culture and has strengthened it through a really difficult time through the pandemic.
She discussed one of the things she learned and that she was good at was saying in this unbelievably uncertain time of the pandemic where tech companies were shrinking. It was all weird. She said to a lot of her constituencies, “Look, I don’t know. I don’t know what the future holds here. I’m going to be honest with you.” She also shared her board performance liat with her direct reports, not just the good parts, but the stuff that she needs to work on too. These are all just great moves to start to show the rest of the organization it is okay not to be perfect, not to put on the brave front, not to be winning all of the time.
Jack Welch’s autobiography was called Winning, and it 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. Now, we’re not going to kill anybody, but we’re absolutely going to launch some rockets that are going to blow up on the launchpad.”
Bezos said a few years back in the shareholder’s letter, “We are incubating multi-billion dollar failures inside Amazon right now. That’s appropriate for a company of our scale.” And you look at Alexa and I think maybe he was right about that.
But the point is that this obsession with winning and being on top and being right and being dominant, that has to go away.
ADI IGNATIUS:
I want to get to audience questions. One came from Shabana in Pakistan. What kinds of organizational design, organizational structures, do you need to foster this sort of geek culture?
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 resmi practices.
Netflix is fairly famous for having the no-vacation-days policy. Amazon has extremely strict vacation policies for different levels of employee.
I think it’s not a matter of the org chart or the org structure that you have. It’s not so much a matter of how resmi a lot of your policies are. It’s a matter of your norms. I love that word and I use it in the book all the time.
A norm is a behavior that the people around you expect. Maybe it’s written down in the employee manual. Very often it’s not. It’s community policing. It’s what the people around you expect. If you go out of line and violate a norm in a community, you will know that fairly quickly and you will either come back into line or you’re just not going to stick around very long.
If you can work on these norms of science, argue about evidence, of ownership, push authority and decision-making down to an uncomfortable degree, speed, iterate, don’t plan, don’t analyze, build stuff, get feedback, learn from reality 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.
ADI IGNATIUS:
So Bob from our audience is asking, “Is the stack of books on your right your reading list for the week?”
ANDREW MCAFEE:
These are from all over the place. But there was a stack of books that I kept referring to when I was writing The Geek Way, and they were not business books. I am sorry to admit this as a business book writer.
They were books from this relatively new field called cultural evolution, which gets at this fundamental question, “Why are we the only species on the planet that builds spaceships?” Nothing else is even close. We’re really the only ones out there. The octopuses are not going to do it. The ants, the bees, the chimpanzees are not going to do it. Why are we humans the only spaceship-building species on the planet? This field of cultural evolution to me has come up with the best answer to that question, which is we are the only species that cooperates intensely with large numbers of people that we’re not related to. We are the species that learns the quickest, that improves its toolkit, its technologies, its cultures most rapidly over time.
You can take that and put that to work in a company. A company is a large grup of mostly unrelated people. And the goal of a company is to improve its culture, its artifacts, its technologies, its practices over time. The goal of a company is to practice very rapid cultural evolution. Now that we know a bit about how cultural evolution happens, we can put those insights to work.
There’s this massive unexplored opportunity to take the insights from this field and put them to work inside the company. I think it’s so massive because I haven’t heard anybody talk using cultural evolution’s terms inside even very geeky companies. This is very, very new stuff. And I think The Geek Way is the first applied business book of cultural evolution.