Time to hack out of our boxes?

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.

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.

You know the types: The one who talks wayyyy too loudly on private calls, completely disrupting everyone around him. Or the self-important person whose incoming text messages are always far more important than actually giving you his undivided attention for five minutes. Yeah, those types.

If you work w/ one of those, maybe it’s time for the ultimate work-around: A cell phone jammer. Churches, temples, theaters, concert halls and museums use them to ensure that their cultural norms are preserved and so self-possessed people need to exit the locale to talk loudly or check the scores from their favorite team.

Extreme? Maybe. But sometimes that’s what’s called for.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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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Do you have a child who is in Grade 4 or 5 or higher? Here’s what they don’t tell you they’re up to in Computer Lab. This student shows everyone how to get into any site that’s blocked by your children’s school IT wizard. Poof. No more blocking!

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?

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.

photo: newint.org

photo: aheadinbiz.com

In the text of this 1990 speech, given to the German Informatics Society, he warns us all: [That] “which once was our friend, turned against us, as well. I refer to information….The tie between information and action has been severed….It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don’t know what to do with it.”

Prescient reading.

photo: organizingla.com

Chats/IMs/Tweets/etc. are killing meetings in some companies. And this post calls that a bad thing? Hullo? In what universe is that?

Yes, some f2f meetings are super-critical. But the amount of good meetings like that and f**king-horrible-waste-of-time meetings is outrageous. Meetings are dead, long live meetings! (Only the good and useful kind)

Working Smarter on Business Basics…Or…Time for a Rethink? HBR blogger Scott Anthony seems to think that the core problem is that business can’t seem to make money on ideas from Day 1 — an inability to capitalize and monetize ideas quickly.

For most companies, we don’t think that’s it. Although Biz Week does illustrate the power of capitalizing on innovation quickly with its story on how Google’s past employees have built, networked and invested in over 200 startups since 2005. (Key word: Past employees…The issue is retaining that innovation within companies.)

We think the core reason, for most companies, is closer to what innovation guru Clayton Christensen wrote in Biz Week: He’s writing about the healthcare debate, but substitute “business” for “healthcare” and “workforce” for “patients” and he’s made the perfect case for forbidden innovation…hacking work…

“The cause of runaway health costs is malpractice, but not the medical kind. Rather, we’re guilty of business model malpractice on a grand scale. Most caregivers in our system bring great talent and commitment to their patients. But the systems in which they work compromise quality and push up costs.”

The systems that we build to leverage people’s brilliance and innovations are broken: we think that’s what’s stopping innovation.

“The force is strong with this one.” That could be said of defenders of Good or their opposites…Evil-doers. Josh and Bill found a benevolent hacker in a bank who used the Force for good — to give the senior team what they wanted and do more with less, for less costs.

But news reports bring us reminders that the Force can also be used for evil. HSBC Admits Huge Swiss Bank Data Theft. Critics of our core thesis — that benevolent hacking can and must will be used as a force for good — will quickly point to this news item to call us crazy. About 24,000 clients of HSBC’s private banking operation in Switzerland had personal details stolen by a former employee, the company has admitted.

Here’s the likely reaction: “Josh and Bill are crazy! How dare they unleash a Force that could do such horrible damage! Keel haul them!” Well, just as storyteller George Lucas understood…the Force is always there, all-powerful and neutral. It’s up to us to determine whether it is used as a Force for good or for evil. It works both ways.

Yes, we are for unleashing the Force for good — to unleash forbidden innovation. AND we are also for putting in controls to ensure that prohibit and limit the use of the Force for evil. A paradox? No different than Original Sin….choice. The power is always there…It’s up to us to figure out how to use it, and how not to use it.