Andrew McAfee on the Geek Way

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🗓️ 20 November 2023

⏱️ 73 minutes

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Summary

What's different about companies that accomplish amazing things? Perhaps surprisingly, says Andrew McAfee of MIT, it has nothing to do with being agile or with better technology. Instead, they've developed what he calls "geek" cultures, which emphasize intense cooperation, rapid learning curves, and a lack of hierarchy. Listen as McAfee talks about his book The Geek Way with EconTalk's Russ Roberts and how focusing on company norms, as opposed to organizational charts and structure, is a key to realizing big ambitions. They also discuss the role that data and evidence play in geek companies' decision-making and why the willingness to embrace failure is a winning strategy.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:08.0	I'm your host Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to Econ Talk. in to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done
0:24.5	going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econ talk.org we'd love to hear from you. Today is October 23, my guest is Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at MIT's
0:44.8	Sloan School of Management and the inaugural visiting fellow in the
0:48.6	Technology and Society Group at Google. This is Andrew's third appearance on Aikontalk.
0:53.9	He was last year in October of 2019 talking about his book more from less.
1:00.6	Our topic for today is his latest book, The Geek Way, the radical mindset that drives extraordinary results.
1:08.0	And he welcome back to Econ Talk.
1:10.0	Russ, it is a pleasure to be back. Thanks for having me. The Geekway is a is as you
1:16.6	describe it a set of solutions for thriving in this faster moving world.
1:21.4	They're cultural solutions, not technological ones. And I want you to talk
1:25.7	about the two parts of that. Let's start with actually the last part. It's not a technological
1:30.9	claim. You're not saying that the tech companies of America
1:34.6	have figured out something special. The second claim you're making is that what's
1:39.4	special is the cultural impact of these companies you're looking at.
1:45.0	Let's take those two parts together.
1:47.0	Tell us about both parts.
1:48.0	Yeah, correct and correct.
1:50.0	So Russ, if you had told me, I think even five years ago that I would ever write a book about
1:54.8	corporate culture, I would have laughed in your face.
1:57.4	It was just, I couldn't imagine a universe in which that would feel like something I would
2:01.5	want to do.
	...

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