Geeks shall inherit the Earth

…so the old Silicon Valley saying goes.

Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt One of the first articles I remember reading on the topic of managing geeks was in Fast Company magazine in 1999. In the article Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Novell Inc. gave his viewpoint on how to get the best out of these talented, if somewhat unique people. Schmidt, himself a geek by anyone’s standards, is now CEO of the World’s most famous geek company, Google. Google also happen to have the World’s most famous brand. Google has a blend of techie geeks, marketing geeks and sales geeks. All in all a lot of geeks.

Outside of Silicon Valley or a Web design consultancy it seems that many older companies with older management values still struggle to understand how to get the best out of talented people. The again, even those companies that I’ve visited as either customer or partner or supplier that have ‘thinking rooms’ filled with chaise lounges or bean bags, table football tables, arcade
machines and all this innovative ’stuff’ have gone too far I think. It’s much simpler than that.

I’ll use an example which is close to my area of experience; software development. To me a software developer is a little like a footballer (for those readers from the US I’m referring to soccer here). They need to constantly train and to practice not just their programming skills but their thought processes, the way they communicate (whether verbal or written) and the way to optimise what they do. They do this because, like footballers, they are asked to perform at a specific time period. For a footballer it would more often than not be for 90 minutes on a Saturday afternoon at 3pm. For a developer it might be for a few hours on a Thursday afternoon, or a Wednesday morning when they need to cut the code. A a developer this is equivalent of going into
‘the zone’.

In football the goal posts, literally, don’t normally change. Ok so conditions may change. It could rain, causing a footballer to need to change the way they play, maybe even use different boots. But for a developer when the goal posts change it’s more like the equivalent of a footballer having to play a match in zero-gravity. Football is not rocket science.Software development is. So managing the people who make software is very important and is a skill in its own right.

It’s more complicated than that though. How do you balance the ’special’ treatment that geeks need to receive against the disgruntled ‘normal’ employees. Those normal employees that deligently and professionally do their job, day in day out. Geeks are regarded as weird by these traditional employees. But traditional is only based upon current perceptions. In a recent article by Louis Theroux for the BBC the TV presenter and journalist, generally regarded as an authority on weird behaviour, wrote “People sometimes ask who the weirdest person I’ve ever interviewed is - I’m not sure how you measure weirdness…on an odd-o-meter“. Theroux goes on to say “The truth is, like beauty, weirdness is in the eye of the beholder. Often, something is weird not for any intrinsic reason but simply because not many people are doing it. A practice that is considered eccentric or taboo in one time and place is quite normal in another.” This is the stuation that today’s geeks are in. They are the modern day eccentrics, especially within a traditional organisational context.

So, maybe, one day geeks wont be the social outcasts that they continue to be today. Ha! No way. Geeks will always be able to pwn your a$$.