Review: The Geek Way by Andrew McAfee
The book focuses and explores in depth the key traits of successful companies like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft etc. It differentiates four main areas: ownership, openness, speed, and science. From all four openness is mentioned as the key to all other features as it naturally enables them. For myself, I summarize the book as two aspects: environment, and speed. The company needs to focus on creation of an environment where ideas can move freely, basic needs like access to code (including changing the code), data, documentation, support easily available. In addition to that negative feedback not only welcomed but actively sought so any issues can be discovered as soon as possible so they do not become too large of a problem. This requires an atmosphere where people are not punished for mistakes and so there is no implicit incentive for covers up. ...