Time to hack out of our boxes?

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.

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

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.

I was pondering this as I read a Hacker News post on solicited great life and work hacks.

photo: robbinssports.com

Some were awesome, (just don’t go to meetings); some were funny yet useful (whack a screwdriver against a magnet a few dozen times and you now have a magnetized screwdriver); some were commonsensical (buy a box of small LED flashlights and place one behind anything you routinely have to peer behind — the fridge, TV, inside a computer rack).

But one made me go “Uhhhh, I dunno.” Suggested hack: Buy a starter pistol, the kind they use in track races, and store it in your CHECKED luggage when you travel. Your luggage will ALWAYS arrive where it’s supposed to because luggage with guns in them have to be stored and managed with much more attention to detail than all other luggage. Not all procedural workarounds are good ideas!

From LinkedIn’s CIO group discussing “What Are the Things We Hate About IT?”…

image: icons.mysitemyway

It is not so much a wonder that people hate IT,
it is a wonder organizations
still find people to take the abuse.”
— Kevin Wood

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.

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.

Below is an updated remake of the 1968 Eames classic. If you’d like to view the original Power of Ten, here’s how…

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.”
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photo: howstuffworks.com

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?

art: logomyway.com

But one bit of human error was just as tragic and also predictable. It has been alleged that there was some chest bumping between a BP manager and one of the managers of the contractors about whether or not it was safe to speed up a process just days before the explosion. The BP manager “won,” everything was sped up to save the company time and money, and now we’re all paying the price for that manager’s fight to have the last word.

This Pyrrhic victory reminded me of a gig I had with the top 100 executives of US Customs just months before 9/11. We were discussing information overload and, while they complained, they said it was their job to keep spreading what they all agreed was “useless and wasteful” information throughout the organization. (Bureaucratic thinking.) I failed to convince them that their need to keep pushing useless stuff might someday obscure very critical information. As it did on that September morning.

There’s a connection between these two horribly tragic events: One person standing up — often, a mid-manager without being granted the institutional “power” to do so — and saying “Wait a second, this isn’t right…” (Whatever “this” is) …can change tragedy into a non-event. One person can save the lives of oil rig workers, or the lives of people in a skyscraper, or can simply make a customer’s day a little easier, a little better. One person standing up to do what’s right can make a difference. A big difference.