To those who say that the youth today are presumptious milksops, I cite www.theseventeenmagazineproject.com, a critique of Seventeen Magazine by a 17 year-old who is living according to it’s advice. The results are both obvious and suprising, and her ongoing analysis is perceptive and entertaining by turn.
It’s always a pleasure to see dry wit used to deliver insight, but getting it from a teenager who is both leveraging it as a platform (you’d better believe her big-media interviews are going on her resume) and educating her peers is pure gold. After all, who doesn’t want to know what a seventeen year old thinks of seventeen magazine – especially when trying to live by its edicts?
It’s a damn clever hack that benefits everybody – even Seventeen Magazine, for whom editorial accountabilty to their ostensible readers is sorely lacking.
Many of us remember when we were collectively scratching our heads around who should be able to link to whom about what – at least until Google turned it into the best possible way to monetize our online social and financial capital. But some companies are still fighting the good fight, shooting at the only target around: their feet.
Case in point; The Edinburgh Fringe Festival website. They insist that reading their site constitutes a binding contract (not true in any country I know of) and that opening up their platform to others to share, remix, and distribute would cost them significant revenue. Nevermind that most other festivals go out of their way to do just that.
There are plenty of other examples; Vodafone, Ticketmaster, Easyjet – they all prevent deep-linking. That is, the ability for others to link to webpages that are NOT the front page is forbidden.
That means that all their carefully-curated content cannot be shared. Information about their sales, their special offers, their services – all private. Not a very smart way to run a company, is it? This is 2010, and yet the hacks most of us thought had gone mainstream in 1997 still prevail in places – which is exactly why people like us need to boostrap our businesses: they aren’t going to do it themselves.
In Dubai, hundreds of thousands of laborers from all over the world are building luxury they will never experience. Some of those from India are hacking that economic divide — through cricket.
SmartLife realized that the one bond that tied both blue-collar Indian laborers, with few skills beyond what they could do with their hands, and white-collar Indian professionals, was their shared love of cricket. So SmartLife not only organized regular matches with both Indian economic classes, but they also helped establish mentoring programs where professionals “adopt” a laborer to assist in his training and development, and prizes from the cricket matches include free computer courses. (CNN Video)
Hacking Lesson: Often the best hacks involve making connections between people with seemingly different goals or agendas, and helping them see that helping each other is actually enlightened self interest. Are you a connector? Is that your hack?
Wanna see the power of the masses en mass? Get your suited-up butt to Comic-Con next year! (Cosplay is definitely part of the deal.)
collider.com
Comic-Con is not a hackfest, per se. Attendees don’t get to re-write scripts or change scenes or fire actors or directors they don’t like. But, to reach box office or gaming success, most every fantasy/comic/graphic novel/sci-fi-based effort must pass muster with with their fan base. Well over 100,000 fans show up each year probing panelists and directors. They want to know how true those in charge are being to the history, mythology, costuming, and ethos of their characters and plot-lines.
Hacking Lesson: Bottom-up power is real. In recent years, every movie that wowed Comic-Con-ers won instant word-of-mouth raves eventually went on to become blockbusters at the box office. Most every movie that failed to wow them, well, let’s say sales could be heard in cartoon-balooned “Ssssplattt!”s and “Thudddd!”s. The power of the masses to give support or take it away is very real.
Hacking is about solving problems, despite government or big industry’s best efforts to prevent it in the name of the status quo or market share. As in any environment, the more you attempt to suppress a balanced system the more the system will disequilibriate itself to counter you – it’s the same thing that happened with BitTorrent and music downloads, and now (increasingly) with TV and streaming.
Would somebody please tell business to wake up and start working with its consumers to give them what they want?
OK, we’re gonna use one trash-talk about one thing to make a point about something else…Let us know if it works.
In this YouTube clip, filmmaker David Lynch trashes the experience of watching a movie on your phone. No matter how good phones become, even those that start w/ “i,” we agree. People; popcorn; surroundsound; the images enveloping every part of you; experiencing the created world as the filmmaker envisioned it — that’s what we call watching a movie!
We’ll let David Lynch send you a wake-up call, in his own eloquent way, about experiencing a movie. We’d like to draw your attention to the fact that using the best tools for the best experience is always critical — whether it’s for entertainment or work. When your company produces crap project management tools, why subject yourself to that? Why not use awesome tools produced in the open-source marketplace. When your company tries to control your experience of how you build teams or how you communicate or how you perform evaluations or how you report your results with less-than-awesome (AKA: crappy) tools…why subject yourself to that?
Using the best tools for the job…(“best” as defined by “helping you do YOUR best”)…is supercritical. As Mr. Lynch might say IF he were an organizational design expert, “You’ll be cheated…It’s such a sadness…Stop using the company’s fucking tools…Get real!”
One of our favorite teaching tools is Charles and Ray Eames’s film The Power of Ten. It takes the complexities of math and not only explains them simply and powerfully, but does so in a way that we can see the amazing patterns of life that were previously hidden. We all need to learn and understand patterns that lie beneath the surface of our challenges, and The Power of Ten is an excellent place to start.
TEDster Rory Sutherland: “What [we need] is a class of people who have immense amounts of power, but no money at all.” That’s most hackers! Humorous pitch for all benevolent hackers to take over the world. It’s behavioral economics, folks: “Very small changes can have disproportionally huge effects, and vast areas of activity — [e.g.] enormous mergers — can accomplish absolutely bugger-all.” “>
I am sitting in a hotel room in Parma, Italy. CNN is on in the background, talking about Finland legislating mandatory Internet access for all its citizens. 1 Mb broadband Net access is a citizen’s RIGHT! Access to 21st century tools is now becoming as critical to one’s health and welfare as running water and electricity, sez friend of HW, social media consultant Deanna Zandt, during the CNN interview. Net access is becoming critical to all of us in the industrialized world. Which leads right into all that Josh and I are writing about in Hacking Work…
One of the key practices that single-handedly can build or destroy an organization and its people: Access to the best and right tools to do the job, to understand the job, the goals, the strategy and others and to communicate to others. Are user-centered tools (the user being the worker) a most basic and fundamental right of every corporate citizen?
With the right tools anybody can do anything and everything. Without the right tools, we are all hampered, diminished, and our ability to succeed is greatly reduced. Without the right tools, all work is harder and little of it is smarter. With the right tools, anything is possible. What do you think? Are the right tools to do one’s best a right?
A white hat hacker is the hero, a good guy. In purely tech-terms, these are ethical hackers who penetrate IT systems in order to better protect them. In workplace-terms, a white hat hacker is one who works around systems, tools, procedures and barriers so that the individual and his/her team can do great work, and so that the company and customers benefit also. White hat hackers are the ultimate win/win/win good guys. They save business from itself, one bad act at a time.
In Hacking Work, Josh and Bill talk a lot about your need to know how your digital footprint can kill you or help you, and how critical it is to manage it.
photo: vervenorthwest.com
In this blog post, Miguel Guhlin details why 70% of hiring managers say they decided not to hire an applicant because of what they found online. A must-read!!
