What Reid Hoffman Understands About the Human Balancing Act
I feel seen
I first met Reid Hoffman when he and I were on the same debate team at the Oxford Union in 2011. He anchored our side. We won.12
I’ve had the good fortune to be able to interact with Reid a lot in the years since, and have arrived at a conclusion common among folk who know him; he’s a brilliant mensch. I won’t bore you with a litany of his tape-measure home runs as an entrepreneur and investor; you’re probably already aware of a lot of them if you have any familiarity with Silicon Valley, the tech sector, or, you know, the modern economy.
When I was getting to work on The Geek Way Reid was one of the first people I interviewed. We talked a few times, and I kept asking him variants of the question “What the hell are you all doing?” It was pretty clear to me that the ecosystem he was part of (and played no small role in creating) was disrupting incumbents in industry after industry, and was just getting started. I wanted to hear what he thought the key ingredients were of that ecosystem and its companies. Many of the insights I took away from these conversations found their way into the book.
One of the problems with doing someone a favor is that they then ask for more favors. If that someone is a nonfiction writer, their common follow-on ask is for a blurb. No one really knows if having fulsome endorsements (the term you use in the emails you send asking for a blurb3) from prominent people all over the front and back cover helps sell a book, but it can’t hurt (can it?), so we writers importune our fanciest friends and acquaintances (sometimes our editors even reach out to complete strangers).4
So of course I asked Reid for a blurb. He stunned me by countering with “How about an introduction instead?” I conferred with my publisher for a few seconds, then accepted. And soon made Reid regret his kind offer by giving him a tight deadline and bugging him incessantly about it.
He came through in a big way. His whole introduction is at the bottom of this post (because hey, it’s my copyright). It does a far better job of conveying what the book is about than I ever could; it’s a masterpiece of concision.
In particular, Reid saw that one of the most important things I was trying to do with TGW was home in on some first principles for running an organization. “First principles” are foundations or starting points that serve as a basis for further reasoning. In the sciences they’re typically physical laws, like “Nothing moves faster than the speed of light” and “energy and momentum are conserved.” Legendary physicist Richard Feynman gave a legendary series of lectures at Caltech in the early ‘60s that started with a small number of first principles, then built from them to cover a vast amount of territory.
So is The Geek Way the equivalent of The Feynman Lectures on Physics for organizations? Nope no way absolutely not in no sense of the word whatsoever don’t make me laugh.
In TGW I simply claim that first principles for human organizational behavior exist, and that the theory of evolution is the place to look for them. This is in some sense a bold claim. I write in the book that:
looking to evolution is not the dominant approach within business studies. It doesn’t even qualify as a minority approach. Even calling it “fringe” is probably too generous. As psychologist Gad Saad puts it, “The great majority of business scholars are unaware of, and at times are hostile to,” the idea that studying evolution might provide insights into human organizational behavior.
I think this blindness to evolutionary ideas within B school-style organizational studies is a huge missed opportunity, because those ideas lead us to first principles instead of condemning us to be bias botanists."
About twenty years ago my department at Harvard Business School (where I was then working) organized a seminar series on behavioral decision making. I quickly came to see the series as a litany of the bugs in our wetware — faults, biases, and irrationalities in human reasoning. And there were a lot of them. I quickly lost track of just how buggy we were, or even how many different types of bias we had. They seemed as numerous as plants in the rainforest. As we smashed atoms into each other with more and more energy over the 1st half of the 20th century we kept discovering new subatomic particles. The list got so long that Enrico Fermi apparently complained at one point “If I could remember the names of all these particles, I would have been a botanist.” As I confronted the list of human cognitive biases, I knew how he felt.
Then a few years ago I became aware of a body of work that takes a very different view of that list, seeing it not mainly as a list of bugs, but instead a list of features. After all, evolution is survival of the fittest, not the buggiest. Species with lots of bugs — mismatches between what they should be doing and what they actually do or, to say the same thing differently, mismatches themselves and their environments — tend not to last. So our planet doesn’t have slow cheetahs, thin-skinned armadillos, or lean walruses.
It does have lots and lots of humans; we’re an extraordinarily successful species. So maybe all these biases (or at least some of them) are actually helping us? Maybe they’re contributing to our fitness instead of worsening it?
But how could our cognitive biases be helping us? The key here, I’ve found, is to stop thinking of us humans as individual beings for whom biases are harmful and rationality helpful. Or, to use the evolutionary term, adaptive: good for our fitness. Instead, think of us as members of the most social species on Earth. We’re the planet’s only ultrasocial species. Only we humans cooperate intensely with huge numbers of individuals who aren’t family members. As I write:
Ants, bees, and a few other social insects do well at the “cooperate intensely” part—they communicate, coordinate, and specialize as they get food, fight invaders, and raise their young—but they do it all as members of one big family; they’re all genetically related. Some other animals cooperate, but not nearly as deeply as the social insects do. As psychologist Michael Tomasello says about the species that’s our closest relative: “It is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together.”
This insight leads us to a decent first principle: we humans have been shaped by evolution for ultrasociality, just like walruses have been shaped for spending a lot of time on ice floes and in cold water. And just like walruses and every other living thing, we’ve also been shaped by evolution to be self-interested — to strive mightily to pass our genes down to later generations (species whose members don’t strive mightily toward that end tend to die out). Just like all the walruses and armadillos and cheetahs out there we want to pass our genes down, not some stranger’s.
So now we come to a very different explanation for many of our cognitive biases: they’re adaptive features that help us humans accomplish our species’ unique balancing act: being simultaneously ultrasocial and self-interested. Understand that that balancing act is at the heart of human nature — that it’s an inherent, inalienable part of what we are — and a lot else falls into place.
Take overconfidence, for example… it’s usually seen as a flaw in our generally excellent reasoning abilities. A lot of … research has investigated just how overconfident we are, and how this common cognitive bias can be elicited. This is valuable work. But it’s also valuable to ask, Why does overconfidence exist?…Why, in other words, would evolution have designed humans to be overconfident?…
The [ultrasocial + self-interested] perspective immediately points to an answer. Why are we so often overconfident? Because appearing confident—even more confident than is warranted—must provide some benefit to members of our ultra group-y species. As we’ll see in the next chapter, there’s a lot of evidence that it does. Overconfident people generally do well, so we’ve been shaped by evolution to be overconfident.
As with overconfidence, so too with a lot of our other behaviors…
The fact that we’re both self-interested and ultrasocial is, in my view, a first principle — maybe THE first principle — about us weird and wonderful human beings. It helps explain many things, including some of the most chronic ailments of the business world:
Terrible decisions made by smart, experienced, properly-incentivized people.
Sclerotic, excessively bureaucratic organizations.
Big, complicated projects that appear to be moving along just fine, only to have nasty surprises crop up late in the original timeline — nasty enough to delay the entire project by 2x, 3x, Xx, (this phenomenon is so common that it has a name: the “90% syndrome”)
Companies with huge R&D budgets but no real innovation in their offerings.
And many more
I talk about all these in TGW. They don’t arise solely because of our balancing act between self-interest and ultrasociality, but I try to show how that first principle of human nature contributes to the above woes — makes them, in fact, the outcomes that we should expect.
And that we’re going to keep getting if we keep running organizations the same way. Einstein almost certainly didn’t say "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” but it’s still a good thing to keep in mind.
Over the course of the 21st century so far a bunch of business geeks have started to not do the same thing over and over again when it comes to running a company. The new bundle of practices, norms, and philosophies they’ve come up with — the geek way — isn’t perfect, isn’t finished yet, and doesn’t permanently ward off all the dysfunctions listed above. But it does deal with them better than anything else we’ve come up with so far. In The Geek Way I begin the work of explaining why this is.
The last thing I want to do before getting to Reid’s kind and wise introduction is respond to the most common criticism of TGW to date, which is that the book doesn’t break any new ground.
A) That hurts, and
B) I don’t think it’s accurate.
It’s true that there are plenty of other books out there about aspects of the geek way: agile development, radical candor, A/B testing, psychological safety, and so on. And plenty of books about how Silicon Valley companies are run, some of them written by the founders themselves.
But as I say in TGW’s Introduction:
I can’t recall ever hearing any manager, geek or not, talk about many of the key concepts we’ll cover in the pages ahead: ultrasociality, prestige versus dominance, ultimate versus proximate questions, the press secretary module, and so on. I’ve also not come across any of these concepts in a business book written for a general audience (as opposed to an academic one). And while some concepts we’ll explore in these pages are more familiar, like plausible deniability, observability, norms, common knowledge, Nash equilibria, and the prisoner’s dilemma, they still aren’t given enough emphasis given how important they turn out to be.
I wish I knew what to do about the criticism that there’s nothing novel in TGW. I tried to make as prominent as possible the first principle that we human beings are wired for both self-interest and ultrasociality, and to tie that principle to examples both positive and negative from the business world. I guess I’ll just keep doing it.
Anyway, here’s Reid’s great introduction (emphasis added because I couldn’t resist). I wish I could talk about my work as well as he does:
I strongly believe that great technology entrepreneurs aren’t just technology geeks, they’re also business geeks. In the words of Apple’s famous advertising campaign, they find ways to “think different.” They apply their insatiable curiosity and love of experimentation to the challenge of building better products and companies. But while most people recognize that we now live in a veritable Age of Geekdom, no one seems to have analyzed and explained the core principles and mechanisms of business geekery. Even my own books, such as The Alliance and Blitzscaling, which definitely geek out on people management and building multibillion-dollar businesses respectively, don’t examine the meta question of why the geeks have inherited the Earth.
With his new book, The Geek Way, Andrew McAfee (who is himself an alpha geek of the business variety) tackles the central questions of what geeks are, what they believe, and why they have been so successful in the past few decades. By combining management theory, competitive strategy, the science of evolution, psychology, military history, and cultural anthropology, he has produced a remarkable work of synthesis that finally explains, with a single unified theory (which he dubs “the geek way”), the reasons why the tech startup approach has taken over so much of the world.
While many of his conclusions come from an in-depth analysis of successful tech startups and tech giants such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix, he also draws lessons from grade-school children, military planners, and chimpanzees and explains why seemingly human frailties like overconfidence, prestige, and gossip are actually essential to successful organizations.
Along the way, you’ll learn why so many organizations descend into bureaucracy and unethical behavior, and the four key principles you can use to build a culture that combats these value-destroying villains. I predict that this book’s greatest lasting contribution will be the way in which it presents a clear, detailed, evidence-based explanation of how culture works and why it is so important. Never again will you look at culture as a fuzzy, hand-waving management buzzword.
The Geek Way is a must-read for any leader who has wondered how to build a twenty-first-century organization. For those outside the technology industry, McAfee demystifies key concepts such as A/B testing and agile software development. But even technology veterans can benefit from understanding how so many industry best practices and articles of faith stem from underlying elements of human nature that evolved over millions of years. I consider myself a longtime student and chronicler of Silicon Valley, and I still took copious notes on the many new things I learned from reading this book. I think you’ll have the same experience.
Thanks, Reid.
Oxford Union debate attendees determine who wins by voting with their feet. As they exit, they walk through one of two doors: the one labeled “ayes” if they believe the side defending the proposition at hand did the better job, and the door labeled “noes” if not. Reid and I were on the team defending the proposition. My main contribution to our victory was telling the attendees that he would be listening to entrepreneurs’ pitches and collecting business plans just beyond the “ayes” door right after the debate ended.
The debate is tinged with regret for me because the night of our victory I missed the opportunity for one of the greatest clapbacks of all time. Members of both the winning (us) and losing sides wound up at a hotel bar. We were joined by a few of our hosts including the Oxford Union’s estimable president Isabelle (Izzy) Westbury. At some point in the evening I went to the bar and ordered us the house’s signature champagne cocktails. They turned out to be elaborate, with long spirals of lemon peel descending from the rim of the glass and other festoonings. As I was carrying them back to our seats a member of the losing team piped up with something like “Oooooooo — look at Mr. Fancy-Drinks!” (you see why they lost). This provided the best opportunity I’ll ever get to display my erudition and ruthless wit to a suitably posh audience, and to vaporize my opponent. All I had to do — all I had to do — was remember and repurpose a toast the painter Francis Bacon often used, and say “Ned, what we’ve all learned tonight is that I bring champagne to my real friends, and real pain to my sham friends.” But I didn’t. I have to console myself with saying it here, now. Which is not as sweet.
You don’t have to say “fulsome” in these emails. That part’s understood.
One of the worst-kept secrets of the blurb game is that sometimes the book’s writer or editor helpfully “suggests” a blurb to prospects. They’re busy people, after all, so instead of asking them to come up with les mots justes we can just put words in their mouths give them a few ideas. Adam Grant is one of the busiest people I know, so when I hit him up for a blurb about TGW and didn’t hear back right away I sent him a suggested one. He wrote back quickly (and, to my ears, in a slightly huffy tone) that he wrote his own blurbs, thankyouverymuch. Then soon sent me a thoughtful and fantastic one. Like Reid, Adam is a badass mensch.
Le’sprit de le’escalier. One and only comment about getting drinks in footnotes.