Leading Geeks: How to Manage and Lead People Who Deliver Technology

Chapter 2. The Essential Geek

"How do you know that a geek is an extrovert?"

"He's looking at your shoes."

Stereotypes about geeks abound. Unfashionably dressed, pimply, video-game-playing young boys rolling Dungeons and Dragons dice populate the comic pages of most major daily newspapers. Rich, self-absorbed, intelligent, ruthless entrepreneurs line the Marketplace Section of the Wall Street Journal. Kindly, wise, absent-minded professors dream brilliant yet unintelligible thoughts in their ivory towers and yet can't remember how to tie their shoes.

Whether you consider such images funny, crude, or cruel, they are not particularly useful for you, ...