In this TEDx talk, Raymond Price, Chair of Human Behavior in the College of Engineering at University of Illinois, discusses his in-depth research on people that create breakthrough new products. Price begins telling the tale of one innovator who created a product that was worth about $1.5 billion per year….
“As [this innovator] told us the story about how he created that product…he said ‘And then I was in a termination discussion with my manager, and he forbid me to work on this product that turned out to be a multi-billion dollar product…’ We said, well, that has to be an anomaly…Then it turns out almost half the people we talked to were in termination discussions. We realized: something more was going on here.”
These people focused on finding the right kinds of problems, not the problems they were assigned to work on. They delivered forbidden innovation.
The key take-away from Price’s talk is that there are HUGE amounts of innovations as well as customer needs that are buried by corporate dictates. How to resolve this? 1. Learn quick 2. Dive deep, (through self-direction) find the REAL truth that few others are seeing. 3. Create to solve that problem. 4. Deliver results. 5. Never wait for others to champion the solution for you…become its best promoter!
In our travels, we have encountered many who fear reprisals if they benevolently hack, or that following the rules and doing the right thing are one in the same. To break these fears, we encourage you to follow the wisdom of Shaolin Master Po. His blindness does not cause darkness… “Fear is the only darkness.” Fear not benevolent hacking, a force for good it is.
Bad-Ass Hack: Every employee in the company gets their own open-source network maps showing, (for example):
• How their ideas spread throughout the company — or languished and went nowhere (and the map would clearly indicate with whom the idea dead-ended)
• Who is using information that they supplied to solve key business problems
• Who is in each network and how networks used information differently
• How their network was interconnected with others
• The connections between their work activities and the company’s top strategic priorities
• The connections between courses/development assignments and customer satisfaction rankings
• etc.
While the company still maintains control of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and other performance management tools, these network maps serve as speed-freak self-assessments, self-improvements and more among teams and individuals
What Makes This Hack Bad-Ass: These kind of maps and technologies are NOT new or controversial. We’ve all seen them already: To demonstrate what drives global health trends; To visualize your own Facebook or Twitter network; Even to visualize the 9/11 terrorists’ network. And for over a decade, University of Virginia professor Rob Cross has been studying how companies like Microsoft, Pfizer and T. Rowe Price use social networks to discover informal “crowd-sourced” leaders within their organizations.
map: mediarevolutions.org
What makes this a bad-ass hack is turning the power to analyze what was previously hidden and to make completely new decisions over to EVERYONE — Instead of how institutions still maintain command-and-control over who does what, why, when and how. Power to the the people…right on.
With this hack, every individual could see the effectiveness (or lack of…) and use (or lack of..) of their ideas, presentations, efforts, and personal development.
How It Could Save Business’s Ass: Instead of waiting for yearly 360° performance reviews to change the course of individual efforts, each individual could be making their own daily decisions based on real-time feedback and transparent data. Finally, everyone who works for the company could be the best they can be without waiting for The Man to slap them on the wrist or give them their eventual high-fives.
All executives understand this, and want this kind of analysis…for themselves. Saving business’s sorry ass means equipping the masses with the same kind of decision-making tools that the execs have.
Potential Downsides to Avoid: Of course there are downsides. The three biggest are: 1. Unfocused empowerment and decision-making — individuals start making too-independent decisions and reaching erroneous conclusions. 2. Addiction to the data-game. Some individual’s could invest too heavily in massaging and studying their maps instead of actually getting their work done. (Same addiction suffered by many of today’s senior execs.) 3. If not properly managed, the new maps could be the new Wikileaks — plans and data that (maybe) should have remained confidential could get out.
Getting Started: One ideal approach would be for C-suite execs to build these powerful tools for the masses.
Will it happen that way? Don’t hold your breath waiting. Most corner-office dwellers remain stuck in the Stone Age. According to a recent IBM Chief Human Resource Officer Study “fewer than 23 percent of employees use social networking or collaborative technologies to preserve critical knowledge.” And next to none of those are leveraging network maps as described above.
Instead: If you’re interested in speeding up that process from the bottom up, begin with data and networks within your sphere of influence, and use open-source and cheap technologies such as SourceForge, Mugshot, Elgg, iPoint, NetMiner, or InFlow.
• • • • • • • • • • 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!
Safe Zone Hack by David: Bill and Josh’s book, Hacking Work, came at a perfect time for me. I did not know of others out there who think along them same lines I do. That just shows you how long I have been dealing with insane levels of bureaucracy.
In my job at GE, I have spent years trying to teach people about how powerful the “Gray Area” can be. (What Bill and Josh call benevolent hacks, workarounds that aren’t documented for the higher-ups.) That can sometimes be difficult when your world is full of people who want everything defined. Man, at GE that has been painful sometimes. And to make matters worse, we do government work, which is hyper about having having everything documented.
Our team has become inundated with TPS (Testing Procedure Specification) data to analyze and measure performance metrics within my business. Those above me have tried to centralize the data and limit its availability much like the Kremlin. But my position needs real-time data, which isn’t part of the standardized TPS stuff, to make real time decisions. With the help of a teammate, I have just finished a program that will give us everything with the push of a button in seconds instead of what used to take hours and sometimes weeks. It might even help the company clean house elsewhere during our cost-reductions, and leave my department alone.
2011 Edition: Once a month, the Hacking Work boys — Bill and Josh — will be posting Bad-Ass hacks that are NOT malicious attacks on businesses, but definitely are aimed at the unbelievably wasteful practices, procedures and technologies that make employees do lots of unnecessary stupid work.
Bad-Ass Qualification: If you lined up 100 C-suite executives to review the hack in question, 90 to 98 of them would be reaching for their antacids or heart medicines, and they’d all throw a super intense hissy-fit. But 2 to 3 of them would realize that that hack could be an amazing competitive advantage, and seize it!
Save-Business’s-Sorry-Ass Qualification: Big ROI’s for the companies that take on these workarounds, as well as ROI’s for their workforce and customers.
Seeking Your Insights: If you’d like one of your Bad-Ass ideas to be among our 12 posted this year, please either comment below or send Josh or Bill an email. We’d love your help in saving business from itself — one bad act at a time!
SAFE ZONE Hack by John: Call this hack “getting off the grantsmanship grid.” With today’s computing power, much research can be done on a PC that required supercomputers in the past. So for those who aren’t tied to expensive equipment (sorry nanoscientists, wet-lab folks, etc.) and who aren’t required to get grants for tenure/promotion in academia, the possibilities for research are often broader than ever before.
The shift in mindset is simple but not easily achieved by those in the system: remembering that it isn’t about the money and the power, it’s about doing good research. Today’s grantsmanship system encourages and promotes hustler-types for whom the money and the power matter, a lot. But the money and power were supposedly means to an end — way back when, you had to get the money and the power to assemble your lab and your equipment and fight all the battles to keep it all going.
But if you can do the same work today on a PC in your home office, then forget about the money and the power, just do the research. And the Internet substitutes admirably for the libraries and the collegial interactions that all that overhead grant money used to subsidize. Imagine the resulting time savings in terms of avoiding all that grantsmanship, paperwork, etc.!
One not-so-small drawback to this most radical hack: If you can do science for free, will anyone pay you to do it? After factoring in the budget deficits and the squeeze on discretionary funding that’s going to be with us for a long while, we may revert to an era of amateur science, in which interested and educated amateurs do some or a lot of the work. (We may be witnessing something similar happening right this minute in print journalism — will bloggers be all that’s left in another decade or so?)
Obviously, this doesn’t work for big-ticket areas of science, but it’s one possibility for other areas. As with the journalism analogy, there are some pluses but some very big minuses to this vision of the future. People and organizations currently reliant on the academic money flow from the Feds should contemplate these possibilities… their era may be ending.
SAFE ZONE Hack by Robin: My country, Chile, is rather bureaucratic by nature. Although strong calls for innovation may soon lay bare some of the incredible genius that is latent, most businesses follow the same bureaucratic path as government. I am mind-boggled by the passivity of people who have great resources and potential power (…a fixed salary, a huge organizational network, a title…) but who only think like an employee. That’s where hacks come in — stripping away the overgrowth for the young shoots of change to pop through.
My small hack is to turn English classes into something much bigger. There are lots of government funds available for corporate training departments to use for English classes, but personal development is non-exist within many companies here. What I do is conduct what are sold as English classes — memorizing grammar rules, working on vocabulary, etc. — but how my students practice English is by learning facilitation, building relationships, how to coach and mentor others and more. My English classes are actually career and leadership development courses.
When it comes to the tech-side of hacking, there are courses titled “Ethical Hacker Certification.” The idea is simple: teach techies how to hack systems so they can keep them secure from other people’s malicious hacks. Should this idea be expanded beyond geeks? Should hacking work in all its forms — Soft and Hard, no-tech and high-tech — be certified?
Before you go there, you need to know that to hard-core hackers, certification would the ultimate act of sanitized destruction. The equivalent would be urban crunk rap music that’s so homogenized, retirees love hearing it in their favorite mall. Yeccchhh: that goes against the very passions that created it.
On the other hand, hackers learn to improve things by taking them apart and putting them back together in new ways. Isn’t taking hacking apart and putting it back together so it can be taught to others just following the hacker’s ethos?
SAFE ZONE Hack by Dave: One of the biggest problems at my workplace is having new computer applications approved, purchased, delivered, and finally installed by our limited IT personnel. By using Portable Applications I am able to bypass these steps using my USB drive to access programs. There is no way I could ever get approval to install most of these programs, but by running them off of my USB drive, I can bypass installation rules and take my files with me anywhere. Just remember to encrypt your files in case you lose the drive.
Erik Hersman of Ushahidi has helped people out of life and death situations in Gaza, the Congo, Kenya and more. Here he translates his biggest lessons learned for you to use at work.
1. Find Allies in the Same Space and Collaborate
Seek diversity: teammates whose skills are different from yours
2. Create Simple Solutions
Most often, small rudimentary changes can have a big impact
3. You Don’t Need Permission
In work environments, most everyone pays far too much attention to getting permission for what they know is right
image: herd.typepad
4. Be a Change-Maker
Having your boss approve things for you is a narcotic. Kick the habit
5. Status Quo is Risky
Standing still and doing nothing is riskier than hacking work. Status quo gives you a false sense of security. You’re better off being yourself and doing what you know is right
Two guys walk into a bar. By the end of their second bottle of Merlot, they have mapped out some of the major forces of change in your workplace.
Joseph Schumpeter: “Karl, I like you. No one but me knows that underneath that gruff exterior, you’re a teddy bear. But capitalists and business leaders — they’re not very forgiving of your ‘free the proletariat’ rants. And what’s up with ‘workers own the means of production’? That caused you to go the way of the dinosaur for the past century and a half.”
Karl Marx: “OK, so I was off by a few years on the means of production. But aside from all the political baggage I piled onto it, that’s finally true.”
Joe: “How’s that?”
Karl: “The deeper we move into knowledge and service economies, the more that individual decision-making and personal behaviors are either the actual means of production, or a major component of how all work gets done. Joe, that’s not even the best part! An even bigger change happens when your theories on ‘creative destruction’ are combined with mine — entire streams of production will be reinvented on a daily basis by the workforce.”
Joe: “Uh-oh, capitalists will start lumping me in with you…that’s not good. When I wrote about creative destruction, I envisioned that entrepreneurs and business leaders…agents of the free market…would do the reinvention — that Wal-Marts and iPhones would destroy the industries that preceded them, and create in their place completely new industries.”
Karl: “Still valid. But what’s also changed is that more and more workers now have the tools of production within those smart phones. My proletariat’s power to organize work, people and ideas is now equal to, and sometimes better than, their employers. That brings creative destruction inside companies, whether their bosses want it or not.”
Joe: “Barkeep…Check, please…”
Hacking work is the creative destruction of productivity. It’s as if Mr. FreeTheProletariat got together with an economist in the afterlife and they decided that it was high-time to do creative destruction inside of companies, not just in the marketplace. That’s how hacking work was conceived…seriously.
SAFE ZONE Hack by Govert: My first real hack was landing a job at Disneyland Paris.
I was barely 18, spoke 4 languages fluently and was looking for a good summer job. Calling the Disney recruitment offices directly didn’t work, it’s just impossible for a French secretary to believe there’s an 18 year old who speaks 4 languages at a level high enough to answer the phone for hotel bookings. The French education system being famed for producing sub-par linguists…heck I even had to spellcheck my English teacher in my final years, and was booted out of German classes because the teacher “Couldn’t teach me anything anymore, and I was helping the other students too much”.
So there I was, knowing I could do the job, knowing they would want me, but with a glass ceiling dangling over my head.
It just so happened I knew the phone number of a Dutch based-tour operator who knew the Disney offices pretty well (thanks to Mom for being well connected). So I called her, she gave me the phone number of the Dutch recruitment gal at Disneyland who could speak 4 languages herself. I called her and got an answering machine, I hung up… This was getting a little bit too easy, so I prepared a speech, in four languages, switching from one language to the other seamlessly, explaining that I wanted to work there and really was able to speak well on the phone.
I redialed the number, spoke in the message as if it was the first thing that came to my mind, hung up, and waited…one hour. They called me, I was officially hired…But I’d have to pass by and wait a few days so as to organize a little paperwork.
Later on I heard that the usual procedure to get hired takes about two months, calling in June for a summer job would under normal circumstances have left me with a lot of lawn moving and cat feeding jobs.
SAFE ZONE Advice by Mark: My father was a house painter and learned his trade in the Navy during WWII. After the war, he joined the painter’s union. The biggest technological threat to that union then: paint rollers! They made it easy for anyone to do what the unions once monopolized. Same as modern-day hacking — changing the tools changes everything.
My dad’s hack was to start using rollers, which had been banned by the union. He got busted and left the union, but the changes couldn’t be avoided. 1940s-50s: Unions controlled at least 80% of commercial paint jobs. By 1970s, they had less than 20%. But it wasn’t the technological change that did them in, it was their mindset in thinking they could resist change.
Modern-day moral: Give employees the tools they need to do their job, even if that means the company needs to rethink how it gets things done.
SAFE ZONE Hack by Alexandre: Sometimes just walking to someone really helps.
My previous employer had a poor customer service reputation. e..g, I needed to get anything I told to customers in writing, otherwise our bosses would say later, “We never said that.” Because of this, most everyone in the company was emailing everyone else — even those one desk away — just to be sure they had documentation of the exchange.
Instead of emailing, I started walking to as many desks as I could. The result was great: I didn’t experience the “never said that” issues because I could address the questions in an open and frank manner. So that’s the hack: Instead of calling, emailing or screaming, just take a few minutes to walk and meet the people face to face, and you’ll get to the bottom-line for sure.
SAFE ZONE Hack by Caroline: I’m sick of being asked to provide my phone number and zip code at pizza places and department stores. What does that have to do with my purchasing your product? Maybe I don’t want a future relationship with you.
Finally one day at a department store checkout I was asked the requisite personal question and I said “Why do you need that?” The clerk looked up, surprised I’d actually asked. He mumbled something about marketing specifically to me by area code. I said “I’m not interested in receiving those offers.” Lo and behold, it IS possible for them to skip that step, though many will tell you “the computer” requires it. He quickly rung up my purchase and since then I have refused to give out this information when uneccessary.
I’m prepared to put down the pizza, etc., and walk out if they refuse to ring up the sale without it. Let them get the message!
SAFE ZONE Hack by Govert: My technique for hacking has evolved very little. It’s based on finding the right person the talk to, finding that person’s levers: Guilt, Efficiency, Happiness, Speed, etc., then using the right language, the right mannerisms… Basically mirroring their motives and making clear it’s a win-win situation. Everybody wants to be a good guy, and you’re the one enabling them to be just that. Kind regards, Govert C.
A classic business-planning tool is the SWOT analysis (Strengths / Weaknesses / Opportunities / Threats). Hackers can use this tool to save business from itself with an integrated approach to multiple hacks: >Search for hacks that would bolster your or your team’s Strengths >Search for hacks that would address Weaknesses forced upon you by corporate-centered designs… Where you know there are better ways to get things done, but you’re just not allowed to do them >Search for hacks that would create new Opportunities for you or your team, department or business unit >Search for hacks that would address corporate-designed Threats to you or your team’s ability to do your best… These are most often tools/procedures/processes that increase the company’s ability to succeed while contributing little to your personal priorities, career advancement or job security
SAFE ZONE Hack by Yeganeh: Most people believe that it is difficult for women to grow themselves and their careers in mid-eastern countries. At least for me, I have not found that to be the case.
Here in Kuwait and even when I was in Iran, there is actually a reverse-sexism — that if you’re knowledgeable and good at what you do, male-dominated leadership teams want smart women around them, and do a lot to help them succeed. Many pamper the women in business that they respect, even though they wouldn’t do the same for their wife or daughter. Rather than get offended, I try to use that to my advantage — as the starting point for my social hacks. One of the ways I do this is to seek out male leaders as mentors, and then use those relationships to get my ideas implemented.
photo: toptenz.net
Recently our bank’s main shareholders from Bahrain came to our office in Kuwait. I pulled their Chief Economist aside and began describing my current project, and how it really needed his kind of expertise and contacts. I talked about my passions for economics and using the most advanced modeling techniques and analysis. I even made sure he saw the sparkle in my feminine eyes! But, of course, all of that was not appropriate within the boardroom, in front of my bosses.
The next day he came to our department and handed me a confidential report from the Institute of International Finance that not even my boss receives. And he agreed to send me the ongoing updates. I then had the resources and data I needed to do the kind of work that was challenging and exciting to me.
Everybody wins with this workaround: The Chief Economist is influencing our leadership’s team thinking through me, without appearing to apply undue pressure; and my career is taking off because our senior executives are impressed with my recommendations.
From Josh and Bill: We’d like to hear your views on this hack. Some from western countries (EU and US) really dislike this example — they feel that it turns back the clock on the respect that business women throughout the globe have worked for and earned. Others in mid-eastern countries have said it’s an appropriate hack, based on the givens in their world. Will hacks vary in appropriateness and safeness/riskiness based on cultural norms? Your views?
SAFE ZONE Hack by Caroline: My sister is an elementary school teacher for the hearing impaired. No corporation can match the bullshit factor of our public education systems. She is forced to use all kinds of mandatory curricula that are meaningless to students who cannot hear, have other physical and behavioral problems, and are many grades below their grade level. But Washington D.C. insists that No Child be Left Behind… Bureaucrats!
My sister got fed up with being told she needed to explain Christopher Columbus or the scientific method to students who didn’t even know their name or birthday —they couldn’t even communicate because no one had ever taught them to use sign language. So she teaches her students their names, basic foods, birthdays, and useful phrases like “Where is the bathroom?” She had to be subversive about it by constructing a fake and meaningless lesson for her evaluation by the principal. But at the end of each year, her kids break all records on the end-of-grade tests, and more important, they can function in their daily life. Parents plead with her to never leave their kids, and as far as I know nobody ever figured out that her kids don’t know the third step in the scientific method.
SAFE ZONE Advice by Steve: I consulted for Motorola on social media. Perception: The employees were incredibly frustrated with management for lack of a social media policy, and a general lockdown on public comms. They were watching Nokia develop online communities that were so successful they were sucking the air out of the developer market. Motorola management looked antiquated — locked in a 1950s mentality of secrecy that prevented them from building new communications channels with the market.
Reality: When I had lunch with one of the top executives, he put a very different spin on it. He pointed out that in one cell phone, there was technology of incredible sophistication. GPS. Software APIs. Remote communications. All in one tiny unit. The kind of thing, if you knew what you were doing, that could be hacked to steer a missile, or drive a tank by remote. Management was paranoid for good reason — the fear that employees with access to knowledge but lacking the judgment or training to safeguard what is publicly disclosed, could lead to a real-life nightmare, not just a public relations debacle.
I think Motorola sucks at communicating that fear to their employees, and channeling it into effective training programs that would allow them to compete effectively.
Brave new world. Some hacks will and should occur. Some shouldn’t. Senior management holds the key in how they communicate, how they build and earn trust.
In my job at GE, I have spent years trying to teach people about how powerful the “Gray Area” can be. (What Bill and Josh call benevolent hacks, workarounds that aren’t documented for the higher-ups.) That can sometimes be difficult when your world is full of people who want everything defined. Man, at GE that has been painful sometimes. And to make matters worse, we do government work, which is hyper about having having everything documented. 
