Monetary cost to the US so far: $3.3 trillion. That forced one of the most powerful nations in the world to invest about $7 million for every dollar Al Qaeda invested in planning and executing the attacks. That’s one hell of an ROI.

Of course, we’re talking evil here. We should never forget what has been done to us and the toll it had on our nation, our lives and our souls.

But we can also flop the lessons learned. Turn evil power into good power.

In the world of today’s business: The small and nimble can force the powerful and mighty to completely change how they approach planning, executing, treating their workforce, satisfying their customers. The small, fast and nimble can win the noble war of doing more good for more customers and more employees than those businesses currently in power.

Information Week recently claimed, “Millennials Aren’t The Little Devils IT Imagines: Research suggests 20-somethings think highly of IT organizations and don’t flout IT conventions as often as some of us might expect.”

They cite new research by GigaOM Pro and IT support vendor Bomgar — (Warning: Go back to our headline, then look at what Bomgar does) — that suggests the Millennials have more respect for the IT organization than most of us give them credit for.

They cited that while about 80% of IT managers think Millennials’ tech expectations are very different than what they provide (…We agree!…), and up to one-third disregard corporate policies (…We found it to between one-third to two-thirds, when including all workers of all ages, an including all types of workarounds…) — yet only 10 out of 400 Millennials described their actions this way.

Duh!!!!

Does a fish describe being in water as being “different” or swimming in his own way as “disregarding Neptune’s policies”????

The data collection and interpretation still assumes a Corporate’s Way/Good, Not Corporate’s Way/Bad way of thinking.

Corporate CIOs: Your Ass is Still Grass
How about asking Millennials something like “Since childhood, is it normal and acceptable and good for you, when using any tech device, to quickly work around it if the device/system didn’t give you what you wanted immediately?”

They’d respond: “Duh. Of course. Workarounds are not ‘different.’ That’s just what we do. Whatever Corporate supplies us with will always be just a starting point. Then we take it from there.”

Also: Doesn’t it defy both logic and common sense to find that 80% of a group of people have different expectations from you than what you’re supplying…And then conclude that all is A-OK…No problems? There’s a lot more benevolent hacking going on out there than is captured by any IT vendor’s surveys!

Think long and hard about which lens you use when interpreting Millennials views and behaviors. Which lens you use could be the difference between a very engaged workforce and a very disengaged workforce.

Just authorize hardlywork.in to access your Facebook account. It will a generate a fake Microsoft Excel document that lives in your browser, with each row corresponding to newsfeed post, and columns for notes, comments, and more.

Go for it!

Inspiration: Picked up a copy of Hacking Work and was reenergized to keep fighting the good fight.

Situation: Cat is a classical cellist from London, and one of the founders of a popular music festival in a small mountainous, rural, agricultural zone of Spain: Music in the Mountains, or, in Spanish, Música en las Montañas.

The Goal: To fund restoration projects of the mountains themselves, fresh water streams, and for a way of life in the region. To date, local musicians and hundreds of others from around the globe, such as the Robinson College Choir from Cambridge, have performed in the yearly festival.

Poor and Corrupt Leaders Deserved to Be Hacked! Says Cat: “The local town promised funding, but most often it never materialized — even after concerts were performed. Recently the town has started winning prizes for this project, but the local mayoress took credit for all the work, while pocketing the profits and funding for other purposes. As with many poor leaders, her people are terrified and dare not speak out against her, it goes badly for their families afterwards.”

“I have dedicated my life, my money, and my musical experience to all this, and many of my pupils, colleagues and friends have have also given very generously of their time, money and expertise. The only way to right the wrongs are to hack around local policies and procedures, and bring this to the attention of higher authorities. A group of writers and musicians in Granada are starting a petition which will go world-wide, and is a cry for justice for the mountain villagers.”

“Twenty years ago I hacked around my corrupt bosses who were controlling a youth orchestra, and the result was they all got sacked and I got promoted. The orchestra was delighted. That was scary, but succeeded.”

“Thanks again for Hacking Work: The principles of hacking and the inspiring examples, have helped me have the courage to keep on hacking when the cause is just.”

The other day I was listening to Radio Lab on NPR. They told an amazing story.

The Benrath Senior Center in Düsseldorf faced a challenging problem with their Alzheimer’s and Dementia patients: lost in their memories, they sometimes get disoriented, and wander off. This can have serious consequences…they can get hurt or worse. So the most common solution is to aggressively confront the reality of the situation, which usually involves quickly catching and then locking up the patients. Which just feels cruel. But what else are you supposed to do if you want to keep them safe?

The Benrath Center found another way. They built a bus stop. A bus stop to nowhere. There was no bus, only a bench and a sign.

Shortly after, a patient had an episode, and no one tried to stop her and lock her up. They just let her let her walk out and sit at the bus stop. A nurse came out to wait with her. No conflict. No forcing back. Just hangin’. Eventually, the patient forgot why she was there, and the nurse simply said “Let’s go back in.” Now, the nurses even use the bus stop intentionally, taking the patients there to sit until their episode passes.

The strategy is simple: Why not allow that other world — wherever the Alzheimer’s patient is running off to — to be true, for just a beat… and then lead them back to the real situation. This approach is now being implemented throughout the institution. For example, one patient was a baker before he came down with Alzheimer’s. In the Center, he kept wanting to get up at 2am to start baking. Previously, they used to always correct his “bad” behavior and force him back into bed. Now, they just let him get up and bake, and he’s much happier and the Center is getting great baked goods!

The Big So What:
What’s This Got to Do With How Leaders Lead Others?
Everything.

photo: oddee.com

Mostly because they have no other choice, leaders are forcing massive amounts of change on everyone in their company, yet hardly any leaders are building bus stops. The manta is “The bus is leaving. Get on the bus or get thrown under it. Now. That’s your only choice.”

Maybe a responsible leader’s role needs to be different. Maybe it’s building better transitions into the new way of being. Maybe it’s about building better bus stops, and not just forcing the buses to run morebetterfaster. Maybe.

photo: oddee.com

photo: under30CEO.com

How It Could Save Business’s Ass: Managers who walk over their employees are under a mistaken impression that they are supposed to be serviced, when in fact they’re supposed to be helping those employees be more productive. Fixing this misunderstanding helps the company succeed.

Potential Downsides to Avoid: Managers with Napoleon complexes really don’t like being held accountable for their laziness, and will probably be really pissed off. Be careful; don’t get yourself fired.

Getting Started:
1. Create a wiki list associated with your department or team goals and/or activities. List some useful metrics, like dollars saved by your manager’s department, and track them carefully, Key will be that the data must be able to be validated by your manager’s boss.
2. Circulate the page among your coworkers, so, as a team, you’re all documenting complaints and anything that will help the team improve. Keep working on the list as a team until you feel you have enough data to show specific areas that need improvement.
3. Now it’s time ingratiate yourself with your manager. Share the wiki list with him or her and explain how concerned you are that his/her team is getting their due credit or support. (Reverse psychology: You’re really tracking his/her report card and about to turn it in to the Big Boss…But by first inviting him/her to participate, you’re giving your boss a chance to improve on those metrics first.) It’s only fair to give them a chance to address the complaints, right?
4. If your manager does participate, you all have a powerful tool with which to present to the Powers That Be to get more credit or support or change for your team. If your manager chooses not to participate… Oh, well…Then it’s either time to take it directly to his/her boss, or, failing all that: you now have ample evidence that it’s probably time for a new job.

• • • • • • • • • •
12 Bad-Ass Hacks: We’re publishing one-a-month throughout 2011. Got examples of Bad-Ass Hacks? Please tell us about them. We’d love to post yours!

image: modis.com

2. Question your leaders, often: “Explain to me again how you’re adding value in how my time and energy are being used?”

3. Question yourself, often. “Am I changing enough to demonstrate that I respect and trust people? How much value do I place on other people’s time.” Time and attention are today’s most precious assets that can never be replaced. Most people in today’s knowledge and service economy get their job done by using a portion of someone else’s life. How well do you do at that? Are you mindful, concerned and respectful about how you use their life to get your work done?

4. Get your fingernails dirty, often: Experience your company’s systems, tools, and processes from the user’s perspective. A guaranteed eye-opener! Our rules, tools and infrastructure are becoming more bossy than our bosses. Today’s infrastructures drive everything. Look at what you are handing off to people to use from their perspective. Change the rules, tools and procedures based on what you learned. And if you’re not empowered to change them, hack them… benevolently, of course.

5. Share Open Source, social media and crowdsourcing measures, tools and philosophies with one main goal: Changing the conversation. Before actual change, usually comes mindset change. And the key driver of mindset change is changing what we all talk about. If everyone starts having conversations like “why isn’t it as easy to get my work done here as it is at home, when I get to use my own smart device, when I use the cloud more freely?,” etc. Change the conversation to “How easy is it for me to do great work?” That one conversation will change everything!

(Here’s one conversation starter: The SimplerWork Index. Download it. Share it. Change the conversation at your company.)

DEAR LEADER:
A funny thing happened on the way to the revolution.

Your emphasis on productivity and cost-cutting forced us to change how we think about the war for our talent. For that, we thank you! Your ability to stay focused on the bottom line has inspired us.

We had gotten lazy about controlling our own destiny. We figured if we focused on customers and profits, continuously changed and grew, drank the corporate Kool-aid, and did great work — we’d be the masters of our own fate. Boy, are we glad that the 2008-2010 financial crisis woke us from that fairy tale. Wasn’t a fun way to get it, but get it we did.

So we watched what you do. We studied how you constantly push for greater returns on investment to ensure your own future. Based on what we learned, we have rewritten our work contract. You are not effectively managing the assets we provide, and we’re calling you on it.

Decent pay, appropriate benefits, great culture and leadership — all are givens in this contract. Important… but baseline issues. After that, it gets interesting, and personal.

This new covenant between us cuts to the heart of who owns, controls, and sets the rules for productivity. Specifically, how much value you create for us when you organize our work.

It’s pretty simple, really.

More and more, a big piece of the working capital you leverage to get stuff done is ours. You want us to spend our assets — our time, our attention, our ideas, knowledge, passion, energy, and social networks — on work that you think is important. That means, more and more, we’ve got to think and act like investors.

We are students of the marketplace, have learned quickly, and need to audit your efforts: Are you making productive use of our assets? Would an hour invested in a competitor’s firm provide a better return? Are you creating better communities than we can find outside in the networked world?

We were becoming slaves to your infrastructure: That which was supposed to help us now dictates too much of what we can’t get done. The tools we have outside of work are leapfrogging past what we have at work — your love of lingering bureaucracy, legacy technologies and deeply embedded procedures are killing us.

Throw out much of what you thought you knew about creating a “great place to work.” A new work contract is hitting your shores. We call this new covenant Work 2.0. Our relationship with you must return more value on our working capital.

And here’s the thing: Don’t treat us like investors and we’ll hack our work. We’ll join the underground armies of top performers who are bypassing your sacred structures and breaking all sorts of rules just to get their work done. Like them, we’ll take matters into his own hands to increase our own productivity and achieve better results that way.

HACKING BIG BROTHER: Reduce Your Digital Footprint…Now!

Bad-Ass Hack: Workaround Corporate Spying and Bypass Corporate Firewalls. Why should Big Brother have all the control? Why do you have muddle through without access to tools and resources you need? Why should you tolerate them spying on you? If you need access to YouTube or social media or freeware email and messaging services, you should have it! If you don’t want The Man spying on your every keystroke, you should be able to bypass that!

What Makes This Hack Bad-Ass: What can be more bad-ass than working around, bypassing and ignoring the very things that were designed to keep you in line?!

How It Could Save Business’s Ass: Ooooooo, this blasphemy. Anarchy. Breaking the rules must be bad for business, right? Quite the opposite! While there are always some trouble-makers in most any crowd (…people will be people, right?), the vast majority of the workforce want to do their best for the company and for their customers. But because their employers put in so many safeguards to protect against the actions of the few baddies, the good people have way too many barriers placed in front of them. Risk-aversion is killing business’s ability to get stuff done, to be productive and efficient, to be great.

This bad-ass hack is fantastic for business’s ass! It frees good people to do great stuff.

Potential Downsides to Avoid: 1) Never share information with anyone who wasn’t authorized to have it, *especially* when jumping the firewall, 2) Never hack selfishly. 3) Never hack for any of the seven deadly sins. (No porn, no greed or hoarding, no revenge or wrath, no lack of diligence or getting out of virtuous work, no enhancing your own vanity.) 4) Do no harm. Don’t jump firewalls or surf banned sites in ways that will harm anyone else.

But how can you get around Big Brother? Here’s how…

Getting Started:
1. Go here. Follow the instructions to download and install Ubuntu on a USB stick.
2. Go here. Follow the instructions to set up a VPN account.
3. Boot your USB stick onto your laptop or workstation and follow these instructions, to configure VPN connection for Ipredator.

What This Does: Accessing the internet through the VPN encrypts all your internet usage! Running your workstation or laptop with this configuration on your USB stick (with the USB stick plugged in) means everything you do is stored in “virtual space” on the hard drive. Do anything you want online with that USB stick installed and Big Brother will never “see” what you’re up to. Simply unplug the USB stick and reboot your machine… The VPN on that stick encrypts all your internet traffic, and the reboot drops all the data off your machine. Cool, huh?

Alternatively, you can try this, which accomplishes the same thing, but is a little slower.

For more “how to” and “how does this work?” information and advice, go here.

Voila! No more Big Brother! Almost as good as throwing a sledgehammer through a big screen! (To psych up for this hack, check out Apple’s famous 1984 Super Bowl ad above. When 1984 [or, now 2011] won’t be like 1984.)

* Obligatory Disclaimer: There is no magic bullet, and your boss may have done something clever we hadn’t thought of here. Be careful out there!

• • • • • • • • • •
12 Bad-Ass Hacks: We’re publishing one-a-month throughout 2011. Got examples of Bad-Ass Hacks? Please tell us about them. We’d love to post yours!

At the time, the entire world was focused on all the ways those behind-the-scenes heroes help. From oil-drillers lending their expertise to how to go get them, to manufacturers of the capsule that brought them out, to iPods sent down fully loaded with Elvis and lots more…even to the psychologists helping them deal with the effects of long-term entrapment. NASA was even called it for its experience in helping crew members deal with long periods of isolation while in outer space.

At least those were the official stories.

Later, after the men were saved, we learned how those official strategies and tools were hacked.

Drugs were smuggled down to them in letters from wives, girlfriends (sometimes both), and friends.

Porn was also smuggled down to them because officials were not dealing with their “greatest need” after air, food and water.

Yes, the official channels of tools, support, discipline and structure were absolutely necessary.

But so were the underground channels…the hacks. Those 33 men made sure to workaround the system to get their needs met.

Maybe there’s something we can all learn from these heroes?