Bell Labs’ Telstar I:
The first telecommunications
satellite from
scienceprogress.org

I live in what used to be Bell Labs territory. At its peak, the research arm of Ma Bell telephone developed a wide range of revolutionary technologies including the transistor, the laser, information theory, and the UNIX operating system.

During that heyday a neighbor, John, was an engineer for Bell Labs. As their computer systems grew more interconnected, John wanted to be sure that all their work for the U.S. government was secure. So he began his own project to build that security system. But his bosses pulled him aside: Cease and desist they told him. His work might make their government clients ask questions, exposing holes in Bell Labs’ security. (Ah, duh!) Secretly, John kept working on it, hacking around his bosses’ wishes.

Then John retired. Bell Labs owned the rights to all his corporate-sanctioned work. He could not patent any of that work under his own name or profit from it. But they still wanted nothing to do with his security research. He got to take that with him. John took that research and established a highly profitable and globally-respected computer security firm.

Moral of the story: If you know you’re right and your bosses are wrong, keep working around them, even in secret if you have to. You could end up starting a new business that leaves you laughing all the way to the bank.

blocks signals
within 20 meters

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.

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?

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!

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

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!”