Author Andrew McAfee was delighted to learn that my online bio, starting on blogspot and flickr 19 years ago, just said “geek.” So, that is all the description I needed on the back cover (last quote above)
Sometimes, I can see dead companies.
Chapter 6: While discussing the automotive industry, “Venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson told me flatly that ‘Any company that thinks they’re not a software company is not long for this world, because the agile way we’ve learned to build software is becoming the agile way we build everything. I sometimes feel like I have a sixth sense. I can see dead companies. They don’t know they’re dead, but they’re dead because they’re not responsive enough. And the companies that iterate more quickly will just run circles around them. They’re innovating every couple of months on something that you might take seven years to do.’
As he left his job, VW boss Herbert Diess sounded a bit like Jurvetson. As Bloomberg reported in September of 2022, “On his last day as Volkswagen’s chief executive officer, Herbert Diess shared footage from his farewell dinner. The video clip captures the sixty- three-year-old grabbing a microphone, asking his colleagues to gather a little closer and then making a prediction: Other old-guard manufacturers will have trouble with software just as VW has.
‘Where we are struggling through,’ Diess said, ‘that will be the same for everybody else.’”
I was reminded of this by the book review in today’s WSJ: “What distinguishes The Geek Way is Mr. McAfee’s focus on cultural anthropology. He notes that sociability is “humanity’s superpower,” but it’s also our kryptonite. Group behavior is the source of any number of problems. Bureaucracy stems from our innate drive for status. Striving to look and feel important, executives insert themselves into routine procedures—which is why one Hewlett-Packard manager needed the approval of 20 people, most of whom she’d never heard of, to hire some outside consultants. Our highly social nature likewise helped doom Arthur Andersen once it started providing, as Mr. McAfee puts it, ‘clean audits . . . for dirty clients.’ If everybody does it, who is going to speak up? Eventually the rot became so routine that the head of ethics padded her fees at the insistence of a partner.
Management by Hippo is a derisive acronym devised by Google engineers to stand for ‘Highest-Paid Person’s Opinion.’ Hippo has run wild at Facebook, which changed its name to Meta after Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s CEO and controlling shareholder, decided that the future of computing lay in the metaverse. Mr. Zuckerberg, who by one estimate had thrown some $15 billion at the idea by the end of 2022, answers to no one, least of all his employees—some of whom are said to refer to the metaverse project as MMH, short for ‘Make Mark Happy.’”
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