photo: legendsrevealed

In Dubai, hundreds of thousands of laborers from all over the world are building luxury they will never experience. Some of those from India are hacking that economic divide — through cricket.

SmartLife realized that the one bond that tied both blue-collar Indian laborers, with few skills beyond what they could do with their hands, and white-collar Indian professionals, was their shared love of cricket. So SmartLife not only organized regular matches with both Indian economic classes, but they also helped establish mentoring programs where professionals “adopt” a laborer to assist in his training and development, and prizes from the cricket matches include free computer courses. (CNN Video)

Hacking Lesson: Often the best hacks involve making connections between people with seemingly different goals or agendas, and helping them see that helping each other is actually enlightened self interest. Are you a connector? Is that your hack?

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.

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

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?

Awesome resource! Check it out!

photo: links999.net

In Hacking Work, Josh and Bill talk a lot about your need to know how your digital footprint can kill you or help you, and how critical it is to manage it.

photo: vervenorthwest.com