According to a recent study by IBM (also see video below), leaders “get” that the way we are all working now doesn’t work — 98% of CEOs surveyed said they need to restructure the way their organizations work — and they “get” the way it SHOULD be structured….
• We need to include a broader set of “workers,” not just employees, but also suppliers, customers, freelancers and more…
• That we all need to be integrated into a more cohesive whole…
• That, currently, 5.3 hours per employee per week are wasted due to inefficient processes (We would triple or quadruple that number, at least! But, for now, let’s not quibble…everybody agrees that there’s a lot of waste the way things are being done now)…
• That, currently, it’s too hard for employees to find and get what they need to do their job
• That restructuring needs to stop limiting flexibility and destroying empowerment
• That people need to be much more engaged in their work
• and much more…

OK, we all get it: Leaders need to take charge of this and change the way work work. But this plea has basically gone unanswered for decades now. Do you have decades more to wait for leaders to not just “get it,” but to shift into “just do it” mode? Didn’t think so.

If your leadership team is not, right now, building and rolling out new ways of working that are far more user (workforce) centered than anything you’ve experienced before, then they are leaving you with only two choices:
1. Be a victim until they eventually get around to the necessary restructuring
2. Start hacking your work so that you can finally do your best

You know which choice we think you should make…And not just for your own sake: For the sake of your company, your customers, your family…For everyone’s sake, it’s time to start hacking your work.

IDC is one of the world’s preeminent IT research and reporting organizations. They are all over cloud computing as a key driver of corporate IT.

In a recent IDC article on cloud computing, directed at the directors of IT, the author closes by quoting Benjamin Franklin, “by failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”

Corp IT simply is not changing at the speed or with the integrity or intensity that we all need. Why? The cloud, and all the empowering technologies available to all of us, translate into a thread to their job security. The cloud model is a game-changer for these professionals. Power must be shared with end-users (you). Control must be shared with end-users (you). And they’re feeling all the risk. With cloud computing, they lose a lot of the controls lorded over all of us, but assume all the risks of whatever we’re up to.

Some IT execs will embrace this new world on their own. Many will not. If that is the case for you, that means you are going to have to actively take control of what these folks would prefer to hold onto.

They are giving you a choice: Your career success or theirs. This choice should not be forced upon you, but it is. Will the coming clouds finally free you to do your best? If you are like most, don’t look for those in IT to free you to do your best.

In this powerful TEDTalk, posted just one day after it was given at TEDGlobal in July, 2010, Matt Ridley exposes the “secret of what’s happening in the world…. The [secret] is exchange…The habit of exchanging one thing for another [is] a unique human feature…” The more that individuals exchange, the better they get at their work and the more they save each other time. Trade of goods and benefits is a critical part of what makes us human.

The point…as it relates to hacking work:
As Ridley says: “We all know a little bit, but none of us knows the whole…. What’s relevant is how well people are communicating their ideas and how well they’re cooperating…. Through the bottom-up world that we’ve created, where not just the elites, but everybody is able to have their ideas and have them meet and mate, we are surely accelerating the rate of innovation.”

Your role in this hacking work sexual experience:
To have your bottom-up ideas meet and mate with all the other bottom-ideas and accelerate the rate of innovation.

Go…Have sex! Have fun having sex!

They get shit done. They work. They do.

What made me think about this was stumbling upon a recent HBR post about The Four Things Employees Need: 1. Love 2. Growth 3. Contribute 4. Meaning.

Yeah…And?

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m super into the touchy feely stuff. I have advised senior teams all around the world to focus on their employees’ higher-level needs (as in Maslow’s hierarchy of…). I believe the search for meaning and purpose, and being connected, and serving a higher purpose, and being appreciated are all part of what makes us human. All all extremely critical to most employees. Every opportunity I get, I talk about serving something bigger than just getting stuff done.

But at the end of the day — even if HOW they get it done is super important; as in how they served a customer or how they managed or lead others — employees get shit done. They work. They do. And they do it amazingly well considering how under-resourced they are; how under-trained and supported and mentored they are; how over-managed and under-lead they are; how stressed out they are under the constant droning pressure of “do more with less.” Day in, day out, they get shit done.

This is why tools, support, processes, procedures, infrastructure, training and development are so damned critical and deserve to be completely reexamined if not completed hacked. Because most are currently more effective barriers to getting stuff done than they are enablers.

Because employees don’t emp or ploy or ee. They work. Howz about we start loving our workforce by ensuring they have what they need to do their best work. How about we help our workforce grow by removing all the barriers built into today’s processes and tools and infrastructures. How about we fix what’s broken…or we get out of their way and let them fix it themselves. How about creating meaning and contributions by making sure work works.

Twenty years ago, a client gave me this button, explaining “Never underestimate the power of numbers and spreadsheets. If you wanna sell senior execs, make sure you do it through numbers.”

There is so little thinking today by most decision-makers. It’s all about whose numbers can outdo the other guy’s numbers. When and how did this come to pass? According to Steven Levy, in A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge, we all have Harvard MBA student Dan Bricklin to thank for the dawn of the Spreadsheet Era, back in the spring of 1978.

Bricklin and Bob Frankston created the VisiCalc spreadsheet program. Says Levy, once that program took off, “Businessmen [let their] spreadsheets do the talking. Because a spreadsheet looks so authoritative…the hypothetical models get accepted as gospel. This use of spreadsheets has less to do with productivity or insightful analysis than with the art of persuasion.”

The end of true critical thinking died in 1978, and ushered in the era of Leading and Managing By Spreadsheet. How sad for all of us.

EMPLOYEE TOOLKIT: Network Maps

Bad-Ass Hack: Every employee in the company gets their own open-source network maps showing, (for example):
• How their ideas spread throughout the company — or languished and went nowhere (and the map would clearly indicate with whom the idea dead-ended)
• Who is using information that they supplied to solve key business problems
• Who is in each network and how networks used information differently
• How their network was interconnected with others
• The connections between their work activities and the company’s top strategic priorities
• The connections between courses/development assignments and customer satisfaction rankings
• etc.
While the company still maintains control of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and other performance management tools, these network maps serve as speed-freak self-assessments, self-improvements and more among teams and individuals

What Makes This Hack Bad-Ass: These kind of maps and technologies are NOT new or controversial. We’ve all seen them already: To demonstrate what drives global health trends; To visualize your own Facebook or Twitter network; Even to visualize the 9/11 terrorists’ network. And for over a decade, University of Virginia professor Rob Cross has been studying how companies like Microsoft, Pfizer and T. Rowe Price use social networks to discover informal “crowd-sourced” leaders within their organizations.

What makes this a bad-ass hack is turning the power to analyze what was previously hidden and to make completely new decisions over to EVERYONE — Instead of how institutions still maintain command-and-control over who does what, why, when and how. Power to the the people…right on.

With this hack, every individual could see the effectiveness (or lack of…) and use (or lack of..) of their ideas, presentations, efforts, and personal development.

How It Could Save Business’s Ass: Instead of waiting for yearly 360° performance reviews to change the course of individual efforts, each individual could be making their own daily decisions based on real-time feedback and transparent data. Finally, everyone who works for the company could be the best they can be without waiting for The Man to slap them on the wrist or give them their eventual high-fives.

All executives understand this, and want this kind of analysis…for themselves. Saving business’s sorry ass means equipping the masses with the same kind of decision-making tools that the execs have.

Potential Downsides to Avoid: Of course there are downsides. The three biggest are: 1. Unfocused empowerment and decision-making — individuals start making too-independent decisions and reaching erroneous conclusions. 2. Addiction to the data-game. Some individual’s could invest too heavily in massaging and studying their maps instead of actually getting their work done. (Same addiction suffered by many of today’s senior execs.) 3. If not properly managed, the new maps could be the new Wikileaks — plans and data that (maybe) should have remained confidential could get out.

Getting Started: One ideal approach would be for C-suite execs to build these powerful tools for the masses.

Will it happen that way? Don’t hold your breath waiting. Most corner-office dwellers remain stuck in the Stone Age. According to a recent IBM Chief Human Resource Officer Study “fewer than 23 percent of employees use social networking or collaborative technologies to preserve critical knowledge.” And next to none of those are leveraging network maps as described above.

Instead: If you’re interested in speeding up that process from the bottom up, begin with data and networks within your sphere of influence, and use open-source and cheap technologies such as SourceForge, Mugshot, Elgg, iPoint, NetMiner, or InFlow.

Also bone up on the background behind social networks so you can use the tools properly.

• • • • • • • • • •
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!

Safe Zone Hack by David: Bill and Josh’s book, Hacking Work, came at a perfect time for me. I did not know of others out there who think along them same lines I do. That just shows you how long I have been dealing with insane levels of bureaucracy.

In my job at GE, I have spent years trying to teach people about how powerful the “Gray Area” can be. (What Bill and Josh call benevolent hacks, workarounds that aren’t documented for the higher-ups.) That can sometimes be difficult when your world is full of people who want everything defined. Man, at GE that has been painful sometimes. And to make matters worse, we do government work, which is hyper about having having everything documented.

Our team has become inundated with TPS (Testing Procedure Specification) data to analyze and measure performance metrics within my business. Those above me have tried to centralize the data and limit its availability much like the Kremlin. But my position needs real-time data, which isn’t part of the standardized TPS stuff, to make real time decisions. With the help of a teammate, I have just finished a program that will give us everything with the push of a button in seconds instead of what used to take hours and sometimes weeks. It might even help the company clean house elsewhere during our cost-reductions, and leave my department alone.

2011 Edition: Once a month, the Hacking Work boys — Bill and Josh — will be posting Bad-Ass hacks that are NOT malicious attacks on businesses, but definitely are aimed at the unbelievably wasteful practices, procedures and technologies that make employees do lots of unnecessary stupid work.

Bad-Ass Qualification: If you lined up 100 C-suite executives to review the hack in question, 90 to 98 of them would be reaching for their antacids or heart medicines, and they’d all throw a super intense hissy-fit. But 2 to 3 of them would realize that that hack could be an amazing competitive advantage, and seize it!

Save-Business’s-Sorry-Ass Qualification: Big ROI’s for the companies that take on these workarounds, as well as ROI’s for their workforce and customers.

Seeking Your Insights: If you’d like one of your Bad-Ass ideas to be among our 12 posted this year, please either comment below or send Josh or Bill an email. We’d love your help in saving business from itself — one bad act at a time!

We see this time and time again…Oil spills, earthquakes and more…social entrepreneurs are modeling how to hack the system.

Here’s an example that dates back to 2008: Violence erupts in Kenya as the Orange Democratic Movement alleges electoral manipulation in the reelection of President Mwai Kibaki. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan eventually brought both sides to the negotiating table. But in the meantime, people were dying.

Erik Hersman’s Ushahidi.com is a perfect example that hackers’ use of Web 2.0 crowdsourcing tools are already solving ground-level problems that centralized processes (in this case, how aid gets delivered in times of crisis) just can’t address.

Says Hersman, “A game ranger up country was hiding and protecting 60 women and children in the forest. The crisis just erupted, all the official channels were still trying to figure out what’s going on, and he needs food, water and supplies for these people — fast.” The ranger knew that official organizations, like the Red Cross, couldn’t solve his immediate needs while everyone was still in hiding. So he contacted Ushahidi’s social network using his mobile phone — the network quickly found volunteers who could deliver the much-needed food and supplies into the forest.

Hersman then describes the relevance of his tool to hacking work: “We didn’t see what we were doing as revolutionary. All we tried to do was create a better way to share information — in our case, about violence and deaths. But changing how information flows will always undermine hierarchies. Either because those in power want information to flow a certain way — ways that ensure their plans are followed — or because you are exposing something they’re not focused on. The best hacks are to build information sharing systems that aren’t concerned with who controls the purse strings behind that system.

“It always comes down to money,” says Hersman. “For example, the Red Cross doesn’t share specifics on what they see during crises, because nobody’s paying them to gather and distribute information about the conditions they encounter. The same applies to the need to hack work. Nobody in business is getting paid to track what centralized processes do to each person.”

Unless you are blessed with exceptional senior management (e.g., Tony Hsieh, Zappos), don’t look to mainstream business for successful case studies. Most of those in power still see working around their systems as a threat.

Ushahidi and other social entrepreneurial solutions are great templates to study for two reasons:

1. Changing the relationships between people — Soft Hacks — and how they share their own information will be easy places for you to begin, and

2. Because their business models are based on providing bottom-up solutions — meeting crucial needs that are bypassed by typical top-down processes and structures.

A few lines of code make your embedded or mobile device accessible, even it’s behind a corporate firewall. All you need is Yaler REST API, and this link has all the instructions you need, including a how-to slide show.

In Hacking Work, Josh and Bill advise those who wish to get out of Employee Purgatory to begin a two-pronged strategy… 1) Hack away, hack away, hack away all 2) Start your own business, prepping for the day you will be screwed, burned or just plain burnt-out.

But not everybody is cut out for being an entrepreneur or independent contractor. How do you start? In this excellent primer, Jacques Mattheij lays out all the basics for all contractors-to-be. Enjoy!

Who said hackers, alone, should have all the fun and get all the cool tools and toys? Those on the side of “the Man” can hack back, ya know.

Consider teachers…All their students have access to all the world’s papers ever written. How could they possibly discover all the plagiarism that’s happening, and changed those unearned A+’s into actually-earned D’s or F’s? They turn to Turnitin — a service that searches billions of Web pages and millions of students’ papers for plagiarized pages, paragraphs…even phrases…quickly and easily catching those plagiarizers. Here’s how one teacher uses the service.

Of course, so their brand isn’t perceived as solely being the Bad Cop of the academic world, Turnitin offers students the opportunity to “check their own writing for improperly used content, inadvertent plagiarism, or quotation errors.” Yeah, like they didn’t know that lifting those 14 paragraphs word-for-word, without proper citation, wasn’t an attempted hack. And like this service’s name, Turnitin, is designed to engender trust from students. Right.

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.

From LinkedIn’s CIO group discussing “What Are the Things We Hate About IT?”…

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!”

I am sitting in a hotel room in Parma, Italy. CNN is on in the background, talking about Finland legislating mandatory Internet access for all its citizens. 1 Mb broadband Net access is a citizen’s RIGHT! Access to 21st century tools is now becoming as critical to one’s health and welfare as running water and electricity, sez friend of HW, social media consultant Deanna Zandt, during the CNN interview. Net access is becoming critical to all of us in the industrialized world. Which leads right into all that Josh and I are writing about in Hacking Work…

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!