There is no crap from your boss.
There are no To Do’s.
There is no lousy economy. (OK, work w/ me here…You get my point, I hope!)
There are only your choices.
You get to choose how to respond or initiate most everything.
And that’s the one thing that’s in your control.
Choose wisely!
Hacker: Cat Jary, Alexander Music School, Granada, España
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.”
Richard St. Johns interviewed over 500 TEDsters — certainly a group of highly successful people — to find their secrets to success. He came up with Eight Secrets, one of which is to Persist Through CRAP: “Which of course means, Criticism, Rejection, Assholes and Pressure.”
To learn the other seven secrets, check out this short, simple 3+ minute video
Nine years ago, I had the privilege of listening to an amazing man tell his story and ask very insightful questions.
While his stories were then 60 years old, if you listened carefully, you could hear all of today’s themes: trust, integrity, transparency, social obligations, human resources, too few resources to accomplish way too much, and more.
He talked about information issues, privacy and hacking when discussing how British mathematicians broke the Nazi wartime code using a captured Enigma machine.
He talked about social obligations, trust and transparency by asking the question: “Churchill and Roosevelt then knew what was happening. Why didn’t they do more?” He wasn’t angry. I don’t think this gentle man ever got angry. His question was more of a lifetime search through confusion and conflicting truths.
He would be told that if these leaders had done more, they would have tipped their hand to Hitler that they had broken the code. So they sat on their hands, and watched.
“Why didn’t they just bomb the tracks?” he asked. “We now know that they knew, at the time, exactly where those tracks led and what happened every day because of them.”
The tracks he spoke of led to places like Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buchenwald, and Dachau.
This gentle man with very deep questions and few answers was Elie Wiesel; Auschwitz Holocaust survivor, writer, teacher, Nobel Peace Laureate, and humanitarian.
I mention this not to compare our discussions to his. There is no comparison.
But, to me, his questions cut through the clutter of the moment. What we’re really talking about is leadership. And tough choices. And doing the right thing when faced with multiple paradoxes, enigmas, and conflicting needs.
Regardless of the technology or challenge or economic needs of the moment, we’re really talking about mapping a journey where there are more questions than answers, and all the answers require character and a will to do things just because they’re the right things to do.
Again, on almost all levels, no comparison. Please don’t take the mental leap I’ve made the wrong way.
Yet, when it comes to looking inside ourselves, and standing up for the rights and welfare of others because it’s the right thing to do: that’s a journey we must all face every day of our lives. Whether we’re tackling something the whole world must never forget, or whether we’re just trying to make it through another day.
Making a difference matters.
It would be bankrupt.
It would be Chapter 11.
It would have huge signs in the window, GOING OUT OF BUSINESS.
Want to challenge that?
Fine.
illus: cs.cmu.edu
How much would you pay for the flow chart that specified who does what in your current work process as well as the gatekeepers to enforce it? (Keeping in mind that you can crowdsource most any of that…for free, or close to it.)
How much would you pay for all that strategic thinking inside the current 2011 company plan to be “boundaryless and innovative, while at the same time cutting costs by seven thousand percent”? (Considering that most strategic plans are overwhelmingly about cutting costs, protecting the company’s ass, and low on TRUE innovation and empowerment.)
That’s what we thought.
If the design of work were a business, it would have gone out of business decades ago.
Safe Zone Hack by Alan: A free book goes to Alan Hill for this two-part post on Hacking Your Jerk Boss. Congrats!
This hack requires the following:
Courage: Cold Sweat
Difficulty: Master
Yield: Beyond eternal bliss, Victory
(In case you’re wondering, Alan is following Bill’s format for his Courage Meter, an interviewing and reporting device he employed in his book, Simplicity Survival Handbook)
bp.blogspot
Part 2: Emotional Leverage
In another link to his own blog post, Alan refers to Norma’s arch-nemisis, Sergeant First Class Ojheda, and that he got what he deserved — a transfer away from those he was bullying. Alan’s key lesson: Hack workarounds, but never become one of the bullies…they’ll get theirs, eventually.
HR GROWS A PAIR: Finally! HR Becomes An Employee Advocate
Bad-Ass Hack: HR Adopts, Champions and Tracks New Organizational Measure: “How easy is it for me to do great work?”: HR finally gets that the new collaborative tools are the operating system for talent in the 21st century. It finally gets that HR has been MIA when it comes to being a workforce advocate, and it’s time to grow a pair. HR’s early 21st century role is to make it a lot easier for everyone to do a lot more great work.
TM Staples
Yet, in reality (…of course, with the stellar exceptions that everyone cites…), HR is mainly a cost-cutting, reactive advocate for short-term changes, under-performing on the strategic needs of the C-suite, and a no-show when it comes to being an Employee Advocate. And when it comes to growing a pair: When was the last time you heard of an HR exec going toe-to-toe w/ a superior to push hard and relentlessly for his/her employee’s needs? Exactly.
How It Could Save Business’s Ass: The workforce needs to get shit done. Faster. Better. Smarter. Yeah, we all know that. But the way that most every company approaches this need keeps everyone working harder, not smarter. If HR actually stepped in as the workforce’s advocate and made it easier to do great work, most everyone would be working smarter.
In most every company, there are way too many barriers to doing great work.
According to the Jensen Group’s Search for a Simpler Way, among the biggest barriers:
• Usability and user-centered design of tools, processes: Only 27% Favorable
• Speed in addressing bottom-up needs: Only 21% Favorable
• Appropriate, effective use of each individual’s time: Only 12% Favorable
Only 12% favorable in how we use people’s time!?! Where is HR on this? Who is the employee’s advocate on this?
If the workforce had an advocate on these and similar issues, most of the barriers to MoreBetterFaster would be addressed. This is why the top of the list of Best Companies to Work For, are all adopting some variation of “How easy is it for me to do great work?” as a central corporate measure. Removing barriers to great work is the work of a great company.
Potential Downsides: HR execs, be forewared: If you grow a pair at a company that doesn’t appreciate that, you might actually have to find a better company to work for.
Suggestions for Getting Started:
1. Download Jensen’s Simpler Company Starter Kit
2. Use the Survey Tool to assess your own organization’s barriers to great work
3. Use Your Own Data to start a new conversation w/ C-Suite execs about making it easier to do great work
4. Kick Ass: Become a true Employee Advocate
• • • • • • • • • •
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!
Actually, I’m only reading a little bit of the book. The rest of the time I’ll be engaging the audience in shenanygins and conversation. But that doesn’t change the high entertainment value that’s going to literally explode out of this startling expose at Borders at 461 Park Avenue, New York, NY at 7 pm on February 17th.
Bring your girlfriends, boyfriends, pets, children, or “other” to this once-in-a-lifetime chance to see Josh read out loud. In a bookstore.
Afterwards there will be drinks.
- Josh
From BW MAGAZINE, January 17, 2011
NOV. 4, MIDNIGHT
Kinect released in the U.S.
NOV. 4, MORNING
DIY-kit seller Adafruit offers $1,000 to the first person to break open Kinect’s software code
NOV. 4, 4:03 P.M.
“Microsoft does not condone the modification of its products,” a company spokesperson tells CNET
NOV. 4, EVENING
Adafruit raises ante, offers $3,000 Prize
NOV. 5
Microsoft releases less-terse statement. Says it will not sue developers
NOV. 7
Code Laboratories in Nevada claims it’s hacked Kinect; says it can be yours for a $10,000 “donation”
NOV. 10
Kinect goes on sale in Europe and is hacked that day by a Spaniard who claims the Adafruit prize
NOV. 11
Kinect mania begins on YouTube. Flood of amazing demonstration videos
NOV. 14
Kinect works on Mac; virtual air-painting app is born
NOV. 15
Software code for Kinect, hosted on GitHub.com is viewed 15,051 times
NOV. 16
Microsoft says it has sold 1 million Kinects
NOV. 22
Willow Garage inserts Kinect code into its robot operating system
DEC. 1
Microsoft says Kinect sales reach 2.4 million (predicts 5.5m for year)
DEC. 9
PrimeSense, creator Kinect’s hardware, acknowledges the creative ferment and opens a version to developers
JAN. 5, 2011
Steve Ballmer announces Kinect sales of 8 million
The wikileaks debacle continues. What’s most interesting is not that Julian Assange’s Swiss bank account has been frozen and the UK has received an arrest warrant for the man himself, but rather that all the interest is creating the same result you’d expect in any ecosystem – all the chum in the water is drawing a lot of sharks.
We saw this when bittorrent was being aggressively attacked as the prime vector for piracy. After enough silly lawsuits – BAM – we got seedless torrents (which are essentially untraceable). There would have been no need for seedless torrents if people had been able to use them as they had; which was the minority of the time. Instead, the RIAA created an entire secondary market for music by forcing people to find ways to pirate more effectively.
It’s exactly what’s caused antibiotic-resistant bacteria in hyper-sterilized hospitals, or the explosion of Humboldt squid in the wake of the gulf oil spill. Destabilize an existing ecosystem and the most effective species explode in population.
The same thing is happening now with big businesses, and WikiLeaks is a great example. Yes, WikiLeaks may succumb to international attention and the concomitant media and litigious frenzy. But what emerges in its wake will be hundreds of times more effective.
Apple is too much for the magazine industry to swallow. It’s a great illustration of where the real value of a consumer lays, and (hint) it’s not in the subscription price.
The biggest issue publishers have with Apple is around the ability to own subscribers’ personal data. Sure, they also don’t like the 30 percent cut that Apple takes in the iTunes store, but that’s a pretty far second to credit card and personal data useful to magazines for selling advertising. Without it the magazines can’t offer print/digital bundles, which means they’re left with having to assure that each article they publish has merit on its own.
It’s another great example of an old business model clinging and crying to the how things used to be. To put this in context, how successful would the RIAA have been if it had negotiated aggressively favorable terms for sale of MP3s on Napster? Instead we have the current debacle which is throwing the US creative industry farther and farther into the dark ages. Apple and the magazine industry is just another example of the same silly thing – and Apple is winning. Again.
It turns out that Google has just launched an eBook reader application. That last word is important, because it means that Google is not in the business of shipping plastic and metal appliances around, but instead is in the business of providing the data you are most interested in at a price consistently, and minimally, less than their competitors.
In other words, they’re giving consumers the majority of what they want in an eBook reader – i.e., books – without tying them to a specific slab of plastic, a specific library of books, or a predefined contract of use.
It’s a big deal, not least because Google has the chops to pull it off. TechCrunch recently reviewed the service and concluded it sucked. This in itself is interesting because the fact that it sucks hardly matters – google docs sucked when it first launched, and so did GMail. But in both cases rapidly iterative improvements rapidly overtook all competitors, because Google understands that consumer feedback is best taken in quick and steady succession.
This as opposed to shipping a new Nook or Kindle every nine months. I’m not suggesting that hardware is trumped by software here – rather, I’m suggesting that platforms can iterate more effectively than business models which are commodified by physical devices.
I really wish I could have said this better myself, although living in NYC I find the 9/11 attacks singularly difficult to comment on. Instead, let me quote:
“The risk of a terrorist attack is so infinitesimal and its impact so relatively insignificant that it doesn’t make rational sense to accept the suspension of liberty for the sake of avoiding a statistical anomaly. There’s no purpose in security if it debases the very life it intends to protect, yet the forced choice one has to make between privacy and travel does just that. If you want to travel, you have a choice between low-tech fondling or high-tech pornography; the choice, therefore, to relegate your fundamental rights in exchange for a plane ticket. Not only does this paradigm presume that one’s right to privacy is variable contingent on the government’s discretion and only respected in places that the government doesn’t care to look — but it also ignores that the fundamental right to travel has consistently been upheld by the Supreme Court. If we have both the right to privacy and the right to travel, then TSA’s newest procedures cannot conceivably be considered legal. The TSA’s regulations blatantly compromise the former at the expense of the latter, and as time goes on we will soon forget what it meant to have those rights.”
It’s a brilliant article, and as conflicted as I may be about the role of national security in air travel, the statistics are simple to plain to ignore. In continuing with this airport theater I cannot help but conclude that the terrorists have won.
Or not. A recent Wired magazine article describes it thusly:
“A novel anti-piracy measure baked into the Nintendo DS version of Michael Jackson: The Experience makes copied versions of the game unplayable and taunts gamers with the blaring sound of vuvuzelas.”
Vuvuzelas are the cosmically annoying instrument which, despite record levels of global interest in the World Cup, generated an unprecedented number of mocking YouTube videos and anti-African sentiment. In other words, Nintendo is @#@!%*ing with those people who pirate their games.
This is stupid on a number of levels, not least of which is that they are essentially throwing down the gauntlet against pirates by saying, “Oh yeah? You think you can pirate our games? Well, we’re gonna make a loud farting noise at you! How do you like that, huh?!?!?”
Needless to say, most pirates are more than happy to take up the challenge. So much so that pirated versions of the game (and the growth of platforms to do same) are now also growing at unprecedented rates. This is yet another example of how pissing in your consumer’s soup is not as effective as creating new and more desirable products. Or, to put it another way, it’s an example of how innovation is not a matter of clinging to old business models at the expense of your purchasing base, but rather of creating new markets to expand your sales.
Just sayin’.
This is a great example of doing an ostensibly criminal hack for the good of a company. Anonymous writes:
“The following incident happened more than a decade ago.
I was given 2 tasks: upgrading a database, and its associated application that ran on the upgraded database. Sounds easy right? Indeed it was! The only problems to this were:
1. There were a few hundred machines scattered across a few locations,
2. I had already written the database upgrading script into a Windows application,
3. I had only a few days to do this, and
4. I wasn’t the system nor network administrator.
5. No Remote Desktop available.
The project manager knew nothing technical about the machines, except that they were Windows and networked. Nothing was mentioned about how I was going to go to the different locations and machines to upgrade the databases and applications, and whether I’ll be reimbursed, etc.
Eventually, I figured out a way to do so. I wrote an application that can create a Windows administrator account, utilized some social engineering and got the application executed. Afterwards, from my own workstation, using the Windows administrator account, I deployed the database upgrade application to all the remote workstations and remotely executed the upgrade. I then also deployed the new application.
Instead of days, it took me only hours to get the work done! I used the time saved to perform another activity which helped the company to save over $250,000 that year!”
FWIW, an application that can create a Windows Administrator account is a damned handy thing for anyone seeking to get master control over your windows machine – and sometimes (as in the above) that’s a good thing!!!!
- Josh
I know I’ve held forth of this before, but the arms race of consumer interests versus government paranoia is getting so rife I can’t NOT comment further. To whit, take these two recent headlines off Slashdot.com:
“The Obama administration is just getting started in its mission to shut down rogue websites that illegally share copyrighted content such as movies and music. The White House’s intellectual property czar, Victoria Espinel, said Monday that the Internet community should ‘expect more of that’ pre-emptive action as the administration ramps up its efforts to combat online copyright infringement — especially the illegal copying and sale of pharmaceutical drugs.”
and:
Amazon Web Services Launches DNS Service:
“Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced a highly available and scalable Domain Name System service designed to give developers and businesses a reliable and cost effective way to route end users to Internet applications. The service, ‘Route 53,’ effectively connects user requests to infrastructure running in AWS — such as an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instance, an Amazon Elastic Load Balancer, or an Amazon Simple Storage Service bucket — and can also be used to route users to infrastructure outside of AWS.”
Just to expedite things, allow me to explain that what Amazon is offering basically means that they can eventually choose not to let the DHS to do what they did. I.e., they can re-route your domain-name queries (which is what happens when you click a link on a web page) to where it *should* go, whether your government has decided it’s unhappy about it or not.
This is a Big Deal ™. It is going to be MORE of a Big Deal as Amazon expands this service outside of the US to where people are more interested in serving the consumer than satisfying certain inherent rights (which may or may not be debatable in the Supreme Court). I.e., China. As this shift happens we’re seeing a pretty plain move towards companies being able to make money, and the government not being able to do anything about it.
I’m not suggesting that the DHS or Amazon is right or wrong in any of this, just that the DHS is crapping on their own faces and Amazon is creating lots of satisfied customers. Given the recent trend toward selling off our privacy in exchange for satisfying purchasing power, what do YOU think is going to happen?
Someone recently posted to us one of their favorite hacks:
“Using Skype Out – I never use my cell phone for outbound calls from
home. I have an iPhone – no coverage at my home office. So, rather
than trying to make a call that will most likely be dropped – I use
Skype Out – $3/month allows me to have my business phone number shop up on the caller ID of recipients phones. Perfect sound quality – and
no one even knows I’m in my basement in my jammies.”
I know I’ve gone on at length about technical literacy being important, but this article is an interesting jolt to the head about exactly why. It turns out that police need this training in order to keep up with criminals, which is certainly true, but also (or maybe moreso?) so they can understand how and why victims are using these same technologies.
After all, a rising tide raises all boats, and right now the only ones at anchor are the big beaurocracies which aren’t motivated to provide training in these “silly new technologies” that all the kids are using. It’s sad that it’s taken an upswing in crimes being solved due to online detective work to get this training to be more prevelant, but it’s also a great example of why we all need to incorporate technical literacy as a goal – for ourselves.
It turns out that “Seventy percent of all convoys carried liquid fossil fuels, and attacks on convoys … account for about half of all the casualties.”
Some clever sod came up with the idea to use spray foam to cover tents in barracks to drastically reduce AC costs, saving the military $2 million a day in avoided energy costs and 100,000 gallons of fuel per day. More importantly, because fuel is such a critical target for attacks removing the number of fuel trucks (to the tune of 4,000 trucks per year) means less targets to blow up. That’s a damned good hack – saving lives and the environment with them!
It runs out that Arizona Senate Bill 1070, which requires anyone to be arrested who can’t produce documentation that proves they’re legally in the country, was drafted under the influence of Arizona’s private prison companies.
This sucks for a whole host of reasons, not least of which is the total subversion of legal due process, but also because, honestly, it’s not very surprising. Big beaurocracies are unethical creatures, and their only mandate is to increase market share. In this case, creating more prisoners is good for business.
That’s where hacking comes in – when more of us are willing and able to compete with sociological entities like the billion-dollar Corrections Corporation (the largest private prison company in the USA) there’s a much better chance that this sort of legislation will never get drafted, let alone pass into law.