The Geek Advantage: Lessons in Agility and Innovation with Andrew McAfee

How have small, emerging tech companies managed to outpace well-established, well-capitalized legacy organizations in recent decades? On SHRM’s Tomorrowist podcast, Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management and author of The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results (Little, Brown and Company, 2023) explained how industry disruptors gained ground through seemingly taboo practices—and how they changed business forever.

McAfee noted the remarkable success of 21st-century “geek” organizations, pointing to four core behaviors: speed, ownership, science, and openness. These traits enable companies such as Netflix and SpaceX to outpace traditional legacy organizations such as Warner Bros. Discovery and NASA.

A notable practice of geek organizations is de-emphasizing the influence of “HIPPOs”—the highest-paid person’s opinion. “We can’t just be following the intuitions of HIPPOs,” said McAfee. “We used to listen to those people as the final step in whatever process we were going through, and then we’d act on that intuition.” McAfee explained the organizational toxicity of applying extra weight to the opinions of the most senior, highest-paid people, calling it a recipe for disaster. In contrast, geeks don’t operate that way.  
 
“The geeks say, ‘Hey, we want your intuition, we want all that stuff, but then we’re going to put it to the same test as we would the intuition of anybody else.’ The HIPPOs tend not to like that very much,” said McAfee. HIPPOs hate to be questioned. Geeks love it because they know that all decisions must be supported by data. So where does that leave the role of experience, expertise, and intuition in organizational planning? It’s a balance.  

What Roles Do Intuition, Experience, and Seniority Play?

When it comes to strategic investments and planning, many experienced leaders have great instincts and intuition. Just because they can’t immediately support that “gut” feeling doesn’t mean others should ignore it. “We absolutely don’t try to take all human judgment or human intuition or expertise out of the process. That’s a terrible way to proceed. But we want to make sure we are balancing it,” said McAfee. “What we should do is treat someone’s intuition not as the final decision, not as the final answer, but as a starting point.”

Geeks use instinct as a vital starting point. But then they religiously measure and experiment. They collect evidence, punch holes through their data, and rigorously debate. The difference between legacy organizations and geek-run organizations is that the former rely on the judgment of a senior person to make final decisions. Geeks reverse that process entirely, using senior leadership’s judgment as a starting point.  

Bureaucracy Bottlenecks Will Kill AI Integration

When addressing the challenges of AI adoption, McAfee warned that bureaucratic organizations will likely remain stuck if they maintain outdated approaches. Legacy practices, such as an overemphasis on planning, can create bottlenecks that hinder organizational agility. “They want to plan for every contingency and map everything out, and make sure they’ve covered every possible outcome before they go do anything,” McAfee cautioned. “The geeks think that’s a recipe for fooling yourself and for killing a lot of time.”  

Instead, leaders should be more flexible and ready to adapt to automation. “Take the other approach, like learn, get feedback, iterate, gather evidence as you go,” said McAfee. “Ensure your leaders it’s OK to experiment, test, fail, and test again.”

Another common trait of lagging organizations is the tendency to distribute responsibility. “They promiscuously distribute the power to hold things up. And when you think about why large organizations get so bureaucratic, it’s because they’re running everything through committees and there are all kinds of approval loops,” McAfee said. Avoiding autonomy and responsibility may eliminate inter-team conflict, but it often forces decision-making processes to go in circles.

“The geeks have decided to build very different organizations that are much more modular, and where there’s actually a great deal of autonomy down at the level of the group or the small team,” McAfee said. But this operational style does come with baggage that scares most leaders off. McAfee added that geek-style operations “can be a little more chaotic. You can have duplication of effort, but you move so much more quickly than you do with these big-integration, collaboration-heavy approaches to running big projects.”

Hiring Mavericks and Building the Workforce of Tomorrow

McAfee also emphasized the need for hiring “tenacious mavericks”—employees who challenge the status quo and bring fresh ideas. He critiqued traditional hiring practices that prioritize degrees and certifications over creativity and problem-solving abilities, suggesting these methods may fail to attract the right talent for modern organizations. “If you’ve spent enough time in a legacy organization, if you built your entire career at General Electric in the 20th century, are you going to be a great fit for one of these geek companies?” he asked.

To thrive, McAfee argued that companies must adopt the geek way of operating—combining speed, openness, evidence-driven decision-making, and mavericks who question the status quo. “I hope they’re increasingly looking for mavericks and renegades, and people who don’t quite fit the mold,” he said. “I think we’re going to need a lot more of that, especially as AI can do more of the grunt work of an organization.”