Just authorize hardlywork.in to access your Facebook account. It will a generate a fake Microsoft Excel document that lives in your browser, with each row corresponding to newsfeed post, and columns for notes, comments, and more.

Go for it!

photo: under30CEO.com

How It Could Save Business’s Ass: Managers who walk over their employees are under a mistaken impression that they are supposed to be serviced, when in fact they’re supposed to be helping those employees be more productive. Fixing this misunderstanding helps the company succeed.

Potential Downsides to Avoid: Managers with Napoleon complexes really don’t like being held accountable for their laziness, and will probably be really pissed off. Be careful; don’t get yourself fired.

Getting Started:
1. Create a wiki list associated with your department or team goals and/or activities. List some useful metrics, like dollars saved by your manager’s department, and track them carefully, Key will be that the data must be able to be validated by your manager’s boss.
2. Circulate the page among your coworkers, so, as a team, you’re all documenting complaints and anything that will help the team improve. Keep working on the list as a team until you feel you have enough data to show specific areas that need improvement.
3. Now it’s time ingratiate yourself with your manager. Share the wiki list with him or her and explain how concerned you are that his/her team is getting their due credit or support. (Reverse psychology: You’re really tracking his/her report card and about to turn it in to the Big Boss…But by first inviting him/her to participate, you’re giving your boss a chance to improve on those metrics first.) It’s only fair to give them a chance to address the complaints, right?
4. If your manager does participate, you all have a powerful tool with which to present to the Powers That Be to get more credit or support or change for your team. If your manager chooses not to participate… Oh, well…Then it’s either time to take it directly to his/her boss, or, failing all that: you now have ample evidence that it’s probably time for a new job.

• • • • • • • • • •
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!

DEAR LEADER:
A funny thing happened on the way to the revolution.

Your emphasis on productivity and cost-cutting forced us to change how we think about the war for our talent. For that, we thank you! Your ability to stay focused on the bottom line has inspired us.

We had gotten lazy about controlling our own destiny. We figured if we focused on customers and profits, continuously changed and grew, drank the corporate Kool-aid, and did great work — we’d be the masters of our own fate. Boy, are we glad that the 2008-2010 financial crisis woke us from that fairy tale. Wasn’t a fun way to get it, but get it we did.

So we watched what you do. We studied how you constantly push for greater returns on investment to ensure your own future. Based on what we learned, we have rewritten our work contract. You are not effectively managing the assets we provide, and we’re calling you on it.

Decent pay, appropriate benefits, great culture and leadership — all are givens in this contract. Important… but baseline issues. After that, it gets interesting, and personal.

This new covenant between us cuts to the heart of who owns, controls, and sets the rules for productivity. Specifically, how much value you create for us when you organize our work.

It’s pretty simple, really.

More and more, a big piece of the working capital you leverage to get stuff done is ours. You want us to spend our assets — our time, our attention, our ideas, knowledge, passion, energy, and social networks — on work that you think is important. That means, more and more, we’ve got to think and act like investors.

We are students of the marketplace, have learned quickly, and need to audit your efforts: Are you making productive use of our assets? Would an hour invested in a competitor’s firm provide a better return? Are you creating better communities than we can find outside in the networked world?

We were becoming slaves to your infrastructure: That which was supposed to help us now dictates too much of what we can’t get done. The tools we have outside of work are leapfrogging past what we have at work — your love of lingering bureaucracy, legacy technologies and deeply embedded procedures are killing us.

Throw out much of what you thought you knew about creating a “great place to work.” A new work contract is hitting your shores. We call this new covenant Work 2.0. Our relationship with you must return more value on our working capital.

And here’s the thing: Don’t treat us like investors and we’ll hack our work. We’ll join the underground armies of top performers who are bypassing your sacred structures and breaking all sorts of rules just to get their work done. Like them, we’ll take matters into his own hands to increase our own productivity and achieve better results that way.

HACKING BIG BROTHER: Reduce Your Digital Footprint…Now!

Bad-Ass Hack: Workaround Corporate Spying and Bypass Corporate Firewalls. Why should Big Brother have all the control? Why do you have muddle through without access to tools and resources you need? Why should you tolerate them spying on you? If you need access to YouTube or social media or freeware email and messaging services, you should have it! If you don’t want The Man spying on your every keystroke, you should be able to bypass that!

What Makes This Hack Bad-Ass: What can be more bad-ass than working around, bypassing and ignoring the very things that were designed to keep you in line?!

How It Could Save Business’s Ass: Ooooooo, this blasphemy. Anarchy. Breaking the rules must be bad for business, right? Quite the opposite! While there are always some trouble-makers in most any crowd (…people will be people, right?), the vast majority of the workforce want to do their best for the company and for their customers. But because their employers put in so many safeguards to protect against the actions of the few baddies, the good people have way too many barriers placed in front of them. Risk-aversion is killing business’s ability to get stuff done, to be productive and efficient, to be great.

This bad-ass hack is fantastic for business’s ass! It frees good people to do great stuff.

Potential Downsides to Avoid: 1) Never share information with anyone who wasn’t authorized to have it, *especially* when jumping the firewall, 2) Never hack selfishly. 3) Never hack for any of the seven deadly sins. (No porn, no greed or hoarding, no revenge or wrath, no lack of diligence or getting out of virtuous work, no enhancing your own vanity.) 4) Do no harm. Don’t jump firewalls or surf banned sites in ways that will harm anyone else.

But how can you get around Big Brother? Here’s how…

Getting Started:
1. Go here. Follow the instructions to download and install Ubuntu on a USB stick.
2. Go here. Follow the instructions to set up a VPN account.
3. Boot your USB stick onto your laptop or workstation and follow these instructions, to configure VPN connection for Ipredator.

What This Does: Accessing the internet through the VPN encrypts all your internet usage! Running your workstation or laptop with this configuration on your USB stick (with the USB stick plugged in) means everything you do is stored in “virtual space” on the hard drive. Do anything you want online with that USB stick installed and Big Brother will never “see” what you’re up to. Simply unplug the USB stick and reboot your machine… The VPN on that stick encrypts all your internet traffic, and the reboot drops all the data off your machine. Cool, huh?

Alternatively, you can try this, which accomplishes the same thing, but is a little slower.

For more “how to” and “how does this work?” information and advice, go here.

Voila! No more Big Brother! Almost as good as throwing a sledgehammer through a big screen! (To psych up for this hack, check out Apple’s famous 1984 Super Bowl ad above. When 1984 [or, now 2011] won’t be like 1984.)

* Obligatory Disclaimer: There is no magic bullet, and your boss may have done something clever we hadn’t thought of here. Be careful out there!

• • • • • • • • • •
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!

At the time, the entire world was focused on all the ways those behind-the-scenes heroes help. From oil-drillers lending their expertise to how to go get them, to manufacturers of the capsule that brought them out, to iPods sent down fully loaded with Elvis and lots more…even to the psychologists helping them deal with the effects of long-term entrapment. NASA was even called it for its experience in helping crew members deal with long periods of isolation while in outer space.

At least those were the official stories.

Later, after the men were saved, we learned how those official strategies and tools were hacked.

Drugs were smuggled down to them in letters from wives, girlfriends (sometimes both), and friends.

Porn was also smuggled down to them because officials were not dealing with their “greatest need” after air, food and water.

Yes, the official channels of tools, support, discipline and structure were absolutely necessary.

But so were the underground channels…the hacks. Those 33 men made sure to workaround the system to get their needs met.

Maybe there’s something we can all learn from these heroes?

When Business Week wrote this great article, The Power of the Cloud, they were writing from an entrepreneur’s perspective. “World-class business technology used to require millions of dollars and months of installation. Now all you need is a couple of days and an Amazon gift card.”

The opening diagram that accompanies that description is a comparison of a tech startup in 1999 and in 2011. Entrepreneurship and the Cloud: Play it again, Sam; I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

But, oh how the biz world is still missing the point! The cloud is not just a boon to startups…It’s a kick-ass jump-start for any benevolent hack inside any company!

Corporate IT still making you jump through hoops to their tune? To the Cloud! HR or Accounting or Logistics still forcing you to do things their ways? To the Cloud!

When we did the early research for Hacking Work, we found that the number one hack was to jump over Corporate’s firewall, doing your work “out there,” then bringing it back “inside.”

With the explosion of the Cloud, that’s just getting easier and easier!
Hack away, hack away, hack away, all.
Up, up in the clouds!

My first job out of college was art directing a hippy, drug-culture alternative newspaper in Syracuse, New York. Amazingly, that led to my first job in the Big Apple, art directing for the New York Times.

Woohoo. Hit the big time. In 1979, went from making about $12k a year (including freelance gigs) to over $60k a year, just cuz the newspaper guild said that art directors were the lowest level of management and that’s what they should get paid. (It certainly was not based on my skillsets.)

popartmachine.com

One day I touched the type with the tip of my finger. “Could we move this from here…to…there?” I asked.

“FOREMAN, FOREMAN!!” shouted the not-laid-off-previous-linotype-operator-now-paste-up-artist. “He touched the type! He touched the type!”

For about 20 minutes over 200 hundred huddled in the composing room debating whether or not to go on strike. And there I was alone, the subject of their scorn, surely staining my paints and whimpering inside, wondering whether the Post and Daily News would run the story as “Stupid Kid Shuts Down NYTimes.”

Eventually, they decided I’d been punished enough, graciously deciding not to strike.

Yes, as in this case, there are always consequences to trying to work around any system.

But the most important consequence (…which, BTW, is a neutral term: consequences can be good as well as bad…) is learning valuable lessons: they could be…
• Learning how to better engage others
• Learning the difference between stupid rules and good rules
• Learning how to be smarter about workarounds
• Learning which workarounds yield the best results
• Learning when to go solo and when to pull in the team
• and so many more

Do not fear consequences. Use them. Leverage them. Work with them. Learn from them.

The only consequence that’s truly bad is one from which you do not learn.

Although their approach might have lacked meaning for many of us, our parents’ message is worth remembering: “Be thankful for what you’ve got. Others are less fortunate than you.”

This message is particularly poignant when we compare the current woes of our world. Thousands dying of a tsunami in Japan vs. one U.S. state stripping the rights of public workers to collective bargaining. Radiation tainting food supplies vs. the price of fuel raising the prices of fresh fruit. Private citizens in Egypt encircling a museum to protect its ancient national treasures during an overthrow of its government vs. private citizens encircling state capitals to get more charter schools. And, of course, not being able to get a wifi connection when you realllllly need it, or having to walk more than three blocks for a latte is horrifying, right?

Don’t get me wrong. All woes, big and little, complex and simple, deserve meaningful solutions. And heaven knows, money and education, healthcare and more are super crucial issues.

But as I travel the world consulting on corporate change, I hear howls and groans focused on wasteful meetings, lousy managers, or being thrown into [company name here] jail for standing up for yourself in front of senior execs.

C’mon. Grow a pair. Deal with it and move on.

Compared to the real woes of the world, the majority of workplace woes should be hacked without any hesitation at all. Just do it. Period.

Hack the shit out of corporate stupidity, NOW!, so you have the energy and passion and time left for real woes, that are even more deserving of your attention.

Bad-Ass Hack: Get your peers fired. We all have to work with douchebags at some point. If we could ensure that they got shit-canned, everyone’s life would be sooooo much better.

illus: art.vassar.edu

What Makes This Hack Bad-Ass: You work hard, and they’re making you work harder. Getting them fired gives them an opportunity to improve themselves — somewhere else.

How It Could Save Business’s Ass: Bureaucracies have a hard enough time succeeding as it is without having to put up with human wastes of space. Sadly, HR has few means for getting rid of them unless they’re axe-murderers or worse. In many ways, these bad seeds keep HR in business… creating all sorts of rules and procedures and boundaries and checklists that have to be enforced and forced on all of us because the slackers and cheaters remain un-fireable.

This hack saves business’s ass by ensuring that more of the best and brightest stay instead of getting frustrated and shackled by stupid rules designed for the bad apples…and by ensuring that the laggards who are pulling all of us down get booted.

Potential Downsides to Avoid: 1) You probably won’t be going to heaven if you inappropriately get people fired, 2) If you get caught, bad things can happen to you. 3) making enemies is never good.

So how to shove the slackers overboard without encountering those downsides? Here’s how…

Getting Started:
1. Figure out who you just can’t keep working with.
2. Determine what metrics would make a really solid case for them getting the boot. Good examples are: Numbers of reports written, lines of code developed, customers obtained, hours spent in the office, numbers of donuts eaten — whatever it is that your bosses will find compelling. This is key: metrics that your bosses care about! You may have other compelling (and extremely valid) reasons for booting them off your team…But what keeps this hack good and not evil is that you’re focusing management’s attention on what the company cares about.
3. Make a graph that you post anonymously, with no labels indicating what the chart is about and definitely WITHOUT the offender’s name on it, and post their numbers every day. Slowly, on the sly, explain what the unlabeled chart means to those on your team — people you trust and who have similar views of slackers. Over time, everyone in the office *except* the target will watch the chart, chuckling as the end drawns nigh. Eventually, word will make its way up the food chain to your boss. That boss will be compelled to take action, nobody will have to point any fingers, and the office as a whole will breathe a little easier.

We have seen this hack work again and again. Sometimes it’s to get a slacker fired. In one example, a team posted on a white board all the local stores and eateries where the corporate credit card (which they were forced to use) was NOT accepted. No one said anything for months as the list grew longer and longer. And the boss passed this whiteboard every day. Eventually, the boss figured out that it was time to address the situation. Other credit cards were finally permitted for corporate expenses.

Go forth: Manage your career. Get slackers fired.
It’s good for business, it’s good for your team, it’s good for your customers.

• • • • • • • • • •
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!

officepolitics.com

I have a perfect example of this sort of self-destructive behavior…

Several years ago I was hired as a manager on a project critical to the companies’ survival. I received carte blanche from the parent company CIO to make all changes needed. My user-centered workarounds: I immediately redesigned all tools for users, removed penalties for reporting problems, instituted penalties for NOT reporting them, restructured the team, and built custom processes to identify and eliminate the sources of issues. Performance improvements were 300% within 2 months, documented annual ROI was solidly 7 figures and everyone on the project loved the new working arrangements.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: However, I later learned the CIO was angry because someone else came up with successful ideas. He reversed my changes, created new draconian reporting rules to cut performance, and doubled our workload twice. After still meeting deadlines, he laid off the entire group. Major clients left because their needs weren’t met, and company morale dropped to nearly zero because of this one person’s ego. This example is also only one of many.

The Root Cause Reason Behind Our Need to Hack: The only way I see this issue changing is to remove the executives as a hindrance. Since they refuse to choose to change, they need to either be forced to change or removed. By force, I don’t mean logically. I mean they do it, or their ego is shattered or they get fired. This means putting in corporate controls that allows workers to control the fate of executives, attaching negative consequences to executives for poor company performance (i.e. lead anchor and gold staircase, no gold parachute). Either that, or start new companies using these new principles that are vastly more efficient. Then push the dinosaur companies into extinction one by one until they either change or completely or get replaced by the new generation.

I’d prefer a more cooperative way of doing things, but the global economy isn’t waiting for us to change. Besides, you can’t have a logical discussion with irrational people, and the people making decisions usually fall into that category.