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The soft bureaucracy of overcommunication

My first thought after finishing this book was: I wonder how hard it would be to create a website called shouldhavebeenablogpost.com\(^1\) where its only purpose is for users to vote on whether a book should have been a blogpost or not.

The Geek Way by Andrew McAfee should have been a blog post.

In saying that, there were a couple of absolute gems that really stood out for me, which made the book worthwhile. But before we get to those, what is the book about?

The book is about the ways in which the Silicon Valley “geeks” run their modern-tech-era companies, and why those ways are better than the ways in which non-Silicon-Valley non-geeks run their industrial-era companies.

The author distills those ways into four principles, which he calls the Four Geek Mantras:

  • Science: Argue about evidence
  • Ownership: Align, then unleash
  • Speed: Iterate with feedback
  • Openness: Reflect, don’t defend

Principles 1 and 3 are pretty obvious to anyone with some interest in Silicon Valley tech companies (Principle 1 says use data to make decisions while Principle 3 says use agile over waterfall).

Principle 4 says that people respond to peer pressure, so make sure the peers in your company pressure each other to do things that are aligned with the values of the company.

Principle 2 is interesting though. It’s about bureaucracy and how it sucks. That’s no surprise to anyone. But McAfee’s explanation for where it comes from is gold:

The ultimate explanation is that dense bureaucracy is the result of status seeking by us status-obsessed [humans]. We invent work so that we can be part of it. We strive to be consulted on lots of decisions, and if possible have veto power over them. Excess bureaucracy is a bug for anyone who wants a company to run efficiently, but it’s a feature for the [humans] who seek opportunities to gain status in the organization. \(^2\)

I mean, intuitively I knew this, but I had never seen it spelled out so eloquently.

But it gets better, because McAffee points out something I didn’t know, not even on an intuitive level. The way to prevent this kind of thing from happening is to create silos within the organization. Excuse me, what? My whole professional life, I had thought that the key to fixing organizations was to break down silos…to encourage communication. But McAfee makes a very good case for why the opposite is true: “cross-team communication can be harmful because it often turns into a soft form of bureaucracy.”

But if you create silos and cut off communications between teams, how will people figure out what to? You make sure that the company’s high-level vision and strategy are clear and that everyone in the chain of command knows how to, and is incentivized to, translate that vision and strategy into clear team-level objectives and key results.

I think we all know that clear vision and clear objectives would make our lives easier, but the point here is that they are absolutely critical if you want to avoid the soft bureaucracy of over-communication.

The other thing in the book that stood out for me was in the discussion of Principle 4, the one about peer pressure. Specifically: how should we define a peer group?

St. Augustine says love: “a people is an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love.”

Anton Chekhov says hate: “love, friendship, respect do not unite people as much as common hatred for something.”

Andrew McAffee says norms: “whether we love the people around us or hate them, what unites them and us into a coherent group is what we’ve collectively decided to punish with painful social rejection—with the threat or reality of ostracism from the group. A big part of what unites us, in other words, is our norms.”

This piqued my interest in a different context from the one in which it was presented.

I talk with a lot physics academics who are considering, or already pursuing, a career change from academia to industry. Due to the strong norms within academia, and the fear of ostracism, this kind of transition can be really traumatic for people. But then, after they leave and align themselves with a new group, it’s hard to remember what all the fuss was about. The discussion in this book shed some light on how this happens.

Overall verdict

I felt that most of the book was pretty obvious and self-evident, and that most of the extended discussion of the four principles didn’t add much texture or depth to the high-level points.

In saying that, there were a couple of gems that really stood out for me.

So I think it was worth reading, but if I knew then what I know now, I would have read the one-page chapter summaries first and only dug into the parts of the book that seemed novel to me.

What do you think?

\(^1\) I checked and the domain was registered recently. I wonder what book triggered the owner to buy it!

\(^2\) In the book, McAfee coined the term Homo Ultrasocialis which he uses to refer to humans, but I didn’t want to go into that here.