The history of business is full of stuff–products, practices, people—that didn’t work out.  If you focus on such Eminent Fiascos,[1] you miss two things.  First, you miss how often standard business practices have produced spectacularly good results.  Second, you miss understanding the life-cycle of industries.  Still, a collection of Eminent Fiascos can make fun reading.  Also, they can provide the launching pad for alternative management theories.  So it is with Andrew McAfee’s latest book.[2] 

            McAfee celebrates the “business geeks” in some very successful high-tech companies (i.e. Amazon, Netflix).  From his studies of such companies, he distills four (but really three) characteristics shared by them all.  Essentially, the “business geeks” create a particular “culture,” then let ‘er rip.[3] 

            The first characteristic is choosing Speed over Perfection.  There will be lots of time to improve your product from what you learn about what actually went wrong when people have tried to use it.  (Hence, updates.)  No doubt investing in Help call-centers or ChatBots will help provide an early-warning system about what your engineers or manufacturing managers screwed up in the name of “speed.”[4] 

            The second characteristic is creating Ownership over Subordination.  You ever see Pieter Breughel’s “Return of the Herd”?[5]  Guy on the lower right is poking cattle in the backside with a sharp stick to get them to move forward.  Seems to be working.  Seems to be an important aspect of contemporary American business management.  What McAfee is proposing is that senior managers should tell subordinates exactly what they want accomplished and by when, then let the subordinates figure out the best way to accomplish this task.  (In the military, this is called “mission orders.”[6]) 

            The two other characteristics really are facets of the same thing: Arrogance in Leaders.  On the one hand, McAfee celebrates “Science” over Opinion/Intuition.  Basically, “Science” means hard data.  (Readers might suspect that McAfee is aligning his terms with recent political debates.)  On the other hand, Openness–to criticism, questions, advice, and adverse evidence—deals with the human element, rather than the data element of resisting arrogance. 

            All well and good.  Been done many times.  The danger arises in passing from Creation to Maturity, from Founders to Successors, from Revolution to Defense.  Bureaucrats ascend. 

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[1] See Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (1918). 

[2] Andrew McAfee, The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results (2023).  To get a quick sense of his arguments, see: Andrew McAfee | Speaker | TED 

[3] Rodeo Terms: FloRodeo’s Full Dictionary Of Cowboy Slang – FloRodeo  Scroll down to “L” while trying not to get diverted along the way. 

[4] There is an analogy to rapid innovation in aircraft design between the two World Wars.  Charles Lindbergh first soloed in a Curtiss JN-4, a cloth biplane with a top speed of 75 mph and a ceiling of 6,500 feet (1923).  He flew the Atlantic in a Ryan with a top speed of 133 mph and a ceiling of 16,400 feet (1927).  In 1944, he shot down a Japanese plane while flying a Lockheed P-38 “Lightning” with a top speed of 414 mph and a ceiling of 44,000 feet.  In some areas and times, innovation comes thick and fast.  Waiting around until everything is “dead solid perfect” just gets you left far, far behind.   

[5] Pieter Bruegel (I) – The Return of the Herd (1565) – The Return of the Herd – Wikipedia 

[6] Mission-type tactics – Wikipedia  The article casts valuable light on the importance of personnel selection and training in making “mission orders” work.  Furthermore, it is made clear that many military organizations have only a nominal commitment to the approach, regardless of what they declare.  Implications for business are obvious.