We all need heroes. During October 2010, we got many. On Oct 13, the entire world cheered! After more than two months entombed half a mile beneath the Chilean desert, the last of 33 trapped miners was pulled to safety. Not only were the 33 hailed as heroes, so were the hundreds of individuals and firms from around the world you united to save them. Amazing story that many of us will remember forever!

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?

Josh and I wrote Hacking Work to help push for changes in power and control in workplaces because our tools and infrastructure have become more bossy than our bosses, and that has to change. Two recent trips shine a light on the fact that sometimes the transition can get messy. Nevertheless it’s time to get on with it.

While in the UK recently, I witnessed the launch of a five year celebration honoring the Magna Carta, the Great Charter of Freedoms.

The Magna Carta is arguably one of the most significant documents in history in establishing obligations and freedoms between those in power and the populous. A century and a half after William the Conqueror centralized and organized power in England the monarchy had grown so powerful that the land-owners revolted. In 1215, their Magna Carta laid the foundation for many future bills of rights, constitutions, and limitations and responsibilities for those in power.

I have also had the opportunity to view one of the original copies, made in 1297, in Australia’s Parliament House. Given the significance of this document, I assumed I would encounter crowds of people and armed guards. Instead, I saw it by myself in a hallway viewing area that seemed more fit for a high school science project, which was right next to a coat check room, with a hurricane sound in the background from one of those industrial blowers because there was a leak in the ceiling a few feet from the document and the carpet was soaked.

Expect that kind of Magna Carta-ish experience when discussing how corporate senior executives will need to transition from today’s approaches to business to infrastructures that are as user(worker)-centered as they are corporate-centered. Important and meaningful conversations, but also pedestrian, messy, noisy, and not a lot of reverence. Within those noisy discussions are certain to be pearls of wisdom — hard-won advice from your fellow hackers on how to bring about much-needed changes.

Bring on the noise!

SIDE TRIP
About The Magna Carta
> The Magna Carta, meaning Great Charter, is not just one document. It is a number of them, from different dates, all referred to under the same collective name
> Publication has its origins in a dispute between King John and English barons, and it went some way towards limiting the king’s authority
> The first document was sealed – not signed – in 1215 by King John at Runnymede. The final one was issued in 1300
> 17 versions survive from the 13th Century
> The charter guaranteed basic freedoms and property rights to “free men”
> The Magna Carta was re-negotiated on four occasions within the first decade of its existence, as both the king and England’s earls, bishops and barons all attempted to redefine its terms

Oceana, a nonprofit ocean conservation organization calling for an end to offshore drilling, gave ten good reasons why the big arguments for offshore drilling are wrong.

It’s a good example of how hackers can bring something new to the table – by providing close and careful examination of what’s actually happening, instead of what people are running around screaming about, they can help us rationally construct an argument about what we can do.

It flies in the face of modern marketing, media, and news reporting, but it’s pretty damn useful. :)

We’ve long posited that loving what you do makes you more successful at it, happier to do it, and more likely to be profitable from it. Add to the list that freelancers working from home have less anxiety about working long hours.

It’s not really a suprise – imagine staying home on a day off and getting a bunch of projects you’d been looking forward to finishing cleared off your plate. Can you see freaking out if you spent the whole day at it, or would you go to bed that evening with a big smile on your face?

If you’re looking for even more of an excuse, compare that against the fact that people sleeping < 6 hours a night are 12% more likely to experience premature death. It’s probably worth noting that skipping the commute will help buy you more time in bed. ;)

Intel recently announced that it wants to network your clothes dryer to monitor your power consumption. That said, there are plenty of examples of DIY, geek-built solutions.

So which is better? The big-corporation-supported solution or the DIY one? It depends on who you are. This is a straightforward example of the costs/benefits of hacking; if you do it yourself, you’ll understand how your power usage works, what the power company isn’t telling you, and exactly what you can do to affect your power costs. If it breaks you can fix it yourself, making it better, more well-suited to your needs, and more interesting in the process. But it’ll take you some time and effort to learn something new.

Once you know that “something new,” of course, you’ll be able to do all manner of other hacks – that’s the endless charm of being a hacker. You may find yourself eyeing your appliances, wondering if they carry phantom load and what you can do about it. Your power bill may suddenly plummet, and you might find yourself deciding to buy a new car with the money you’ve saved at the end of the year.

Or, you can buy Intel’s version, and when it breaks you can wait on hold and have them send you a new one, and be safe in your ignorance of how it works or what it’s doing that the deal you’re getting is generally ok. That’s what most people do, and that’s fine – it just isn’t how a hacker would do it.

Chris Brogan recently published an article about why staying up on new technology is important, and in it he cited Square, a technology product and platform that is liable to rock the entire merchant market.

But the point that is perhaps understated is that Square can rock an entire industry segment. That’s the power of startups, and of hacking existing systems. It’s why the hackers’ mindset is such a powerful thing – and such an essential tool for innovation.

There are plenty of examples of market-changers like Square (Facebook.com, anyone?). What’ll be next, and why aren’t you building it now?

Welcome to the future present, and witness a lesson any 15 year-old will understand intuitively. Sheikh Khalid bin Saqr al-Qasimi, the ousted crown prince of the United Arab Emirates, has launched a multi-million dollar campaign to “undermine the current regime’s standing” and to force the leadership of the UAE in Abu Dhabi to “make a change”.

The plot is being led by British solicitor Peter Cathcart and involves Washington political lobbyists and fake blogs and Twitter accounts filled with content by PR agencies. What’s interesting about this is that they’re utilizing all the same techniques and technologies large companies are, but to a decidedly political end.

Perhaps even more importantly, they’re using political lobbying and marketing to force a coup, rather than the more traditional use of physical violence. That’s certainly cheaper (if you measure lives as infinitely valuable) than the alternatives, and (despite its inauthenticity) more laudable.

This is a great example of the potential severe impact of non-hacking mentality going awry. CA decided to invest significant amounts of their budget in making GPS monitoring devices for high-risk parolees (like gang members and sex offenders) to wear. This *should* be a great idea, right? Making sure sex offenders don’t go into high-risk areas, that gang members venture into enemy territories, etc.? Seems like a reasonable (if draconian) way to augment police efforts.

Unfortunately, more than 31,000 alarms in Southern California are now being investigated for being missed. The consequences for this are severe – parole administrators started the investigation the day after it was discovered that lax GPS supervision of paroled sex offender John Albert Gardner III allowed him to kill two San Diego County teenagers.

But here’s the most interesting bit – officials say the backlog of alerts grew because they lacked the software to create a report of unresolved cases. What’s more, it turns out that the system generated a the same kind of alert for any event – whether a GPS unit was low on batteries or in the middle of a schoolyard. This resulted in a massive overflow of alerts to officers who had no capacity to handle them.

It’s a pretty classic case of mismanaged technology, with tragic consequences. The hacker approach would have been to try it out in small cases, gather feedback, and tweak it until it worked. But the state of CA instead invested massive spending in a one-time expense – and then expected a miracle.

Hackers know – and love – that solutions don’t exist in a vacuum. They need to be evolved over time to fulfill the needs of an environment. Technology isn’t always the answer, but in this case at least, it could have been a much better part of the solution.

Hackers everywhere are crying over the recent Supreme Court decision that business methods are patentable. Remember Amazon’s 1-click patent? It seems that they may have had a case, after all.

This is extremely damaging for innovation, because it means that anything I can abstractly imagine, I can patent (as long as I can demonstrate it well enough for an under-educated patent examiner). There are companies that do nothing BUT create patents, some so they can license them to developers who can actually run with them, and some solely to provide them with ammo for profitable lawsuits.

Either way, it’s lose-lose for society. If we are forced to claim other kinds of return for our inventions – such as social or reputational – we will continue to innovate along those lines. Slamming that door shut in favor of limited economic returns, and returns which favor large companies exclusively, hurts us all.

Warner Brothers is accused of pirating anti-pirating technology. Re-read that sentence, because it encapsulates some of the sweetest insights into how big companies are trying to hang onto their already-dead business models that I’ve come across in a long time.

Simply put, rather than acknowledge that their ability to keep people from freely trading music is beyond recovery, a major record label is stealing software designed to stop people from stealing software, and using it to stop people from stealing their own.

If that isn’t evidence of a breakdown in consumer trust – and an ability to innovate – I don’t know what is. I’m not saying that swapping copies of music you didn’t pay for is right, but I’ll happily contend that stealing software to defend your position against stealing certainly is.

I recently read that only 8% of adults trust traditional media, and yet I wasn’t in the least bit suprised. When the New York Times implemented a full paywall their traffic dropped by 50% – immediately. On the spot. That instant. What’s more, traffic analysis showed that the majority of folks who bounced went… to Google.

When existing business models are failing the all-too-common reaction is to try to shore up losses and hang on to what used to work. And yet for the last several years we’ve seen plenty of evidence that this just isn’t working – the “mainstream media” being a fine example.

My question is when big business is going to realize that quick and nimble trumps big and scaled – because scale is no longer expensive. That fundamental shift makes hacking existing systems on an individual level suddenly profitable and competitive.

Disagree? Tell me why.

Stories like this always make me sit back and wonder if I’m not screwing up the world by encouraging everyone to go out and hack stuff. After all, extensive regulation of things like nuclear reactors is a good thing, right?

And yet, when I read the details, this guy isn’t trying to make bombs, or even an existing style of reactor. He’s trying to make a fusion reactor based on the recently-unfunded work of Dr. Bussard, who showed promising signs of discovering a means of completely safe energy generation.

It’s far out, wierd, world-changing science. It’s not blowing up your backyard at all – despite what the media reporters might make of it. And it’s yet another example of useful, insightful information being inflated into sensationalist baloney.

So instead of hearing “some enterprising soul is trying to advance a promising long shot” we hear “terrorists next door.” It’s part of the reason people really DO need to embrace hacking.

Disagree? Tell me why.

Comedy Central is donating $1 to Colbert’s Gulf of America Fund (up to $50k) every time someone retweets this It’s a freaking fantastic example of how new media is chewing up old business models for breakfast.

Honestly, it’s a pretty obvious hack – just like when Colbert asked “the internet” to mess with Wikipedia’s entry on elephants. He has a big audience, and he’s able to use it. Maybe not the same way as certain other Twitterlebrities, but still – it’s clever. And after he proved his point on Wikipedia, he turned around and used it for good – by getting Comedy Central to pony up for some amazingly good branding.

In other words, he illustrated to them that if they donated a load of cash for his Gulf of America Fund they’d be associated with doing good in the mind of their (potential and existing) viewers, would reach a much larger (and better targeted) audience than if they’d just bought a billboard ad, and (I expect) got a great tax write-off to boot.

That’s a good hack. Why aren’t more folks doing this?

Tell me again why innovation is increasingly a problem in the USA? The FCC’s meetings on the open internet initiatives (which are popping up like mushrooms after a spring rain) are completely closed. The FDA recently ruled that several of the tools used for baseline genomic research are now “medical devices” and thus destroyed an entire market segment of startups. And the most interesting conversation I had this week was about how to practically use offshore tax havens the same way big companies do.

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?

This article is a good one, and not just because it’s well considered. It walks through why we should be worried about running out of food in developed nations.

Or, more importantly, why we may run out of water. And yet, for every challenge mentioned in the piece I could think of a handful of struggling entrepreneurs who were working on a solution. Some are wacky, some imminently impractical, but some have a very real shot at changing the world for the better.

That’s a big part of what we hope Hacking Work will encourage people to do – innovate us all into a better place. It’s readily apparent that an individual can react more flexibly, act more courageously, and leverage their resources more effectively than a big company. At the same time, that same individual can benefit more directly from their contributions.

We may be facing a perfect storm of food and water shortages, but with a little luck and hard work, a perfect storm of innovation will be there to counter it.

Yet another reason our children will be laughing at us. Srsly, if you wanted to blow up a plane, you can. As much as it’s scarier to think about dying in a plane wreck than in an car accident (despite statistically being hugely much more likely to suffer the latter) it’s not USEFUL to do so.

I’d love to hack the airport security system by implementing a reverse-pricing scheme on the airlines. If I could pay them based on their performance rather than on their monopoly I feel like I’d save a bundle and enjoy flying a lot more.

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?

CHINA: “Angry migrant workers use new tools — the Internet and 787 million mobile phones”…”Every worker is a labor lawyer by himself. They know their rights better than my HR officer.” Pull quotes from a BusinessWeek article on the birth of a new labor movement in China. Whoa.

Now, kids, hacking work is kinda like marijuana’s role in the drug world. We all know that hacking one’s work is a gateway experience — a stepping stone for bigger, harder hacks. Like that 600 million workers might begin standing up for their rights.

(…At least on TV): Tube tells us hacking is the only way to get things done. Sergeant Bilko (50s); Sergeant Rizzo/M*A*S*H (’70s-’80s); Captain Rabb/JAG (’90s-’00s); Special Agent McGee, Retired Agent Franks/NCIS (’03-). Quiz for old farts: What spy-hacker did NCIS’s “Ducky” play in the ’60s?

Josh and Bill discuss how all babies were born to hack — discovering innovation and creativity by taking things apart and putting them together again. HBR blogger Rasika Welankiwar writes how we were so much smarter as babies…with built-in protections to keep us learning. Unfortunately, we all grew up and learned the “right way” to learn is to sit in neat little rows and follow an authority figure. Hacking, bad. Tsk, tsk. Follow the leader, good. Gold star!