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

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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Do you have a child who is in Grade 4 or 5 or higher? Here’s what they don’t tell you they’re up to in Computer Lab. This student shows everyone how to get into any site that’s blocked by your children’s school IT wizard. Poof. No more blocking!

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?

A white hat hacker is the hero, a good guy. In purely tech-terms, these are ethical hackers who penetrate IT systems in order to better protect them. In workplace-terms, a white hat hacker is one who works around systems, tools, procedures and barriers so that the individual and his/her team can do great work, and so that the company and customers benefit also. White hat hackers are the ultimate win/win/win good guys. They save business from itself, one bad act at a time.

CHINA: “Angry migrant workers use new tools — the Internet and 787 million mobile phones”…”Every worker is a labor lawyer by himself. They know their rights better than my HR officer.” Pull quotes from a BusinessWeek article on the birth of a new labor movement in China. Whoa.

Now, kids, hacking work is kinda like marijuana’s role in the drug world. We all know that hacking one’s work is a gateway experience — a stepping stone for bigger, harder hacks. Like that 600 million workers might begin standing up for their rights.

Shirky’s Rules
Clay Shirky, prescient voice on where the Internet is taking us…
His essay on the Collapse of Complex Business Models is most easily understood from the last paragraph up: “When the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply…who get to say what happens in the future.”

Bollocks!
Blogger Tom Slee Says Not So Much: “Complexity is not going away. It’s just moving to a different spot in the production chain, and as it moves so does the balance of power.”

Neither essay is simple to get through. But both sides of the debate are critical to our understanding of what is happening to us all.

Neil Postman was a humanist, who believed that “new technology can never substitute for human values.”

In the text of this 1990 speech, given to the German Informatics Society, he warns us all: [That] “which once was our friend, turned against us, as well. I refer to information….The tie between information and action has been severed….It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don’t know what to do with it.”

Prescient reading.

Forbes.com posting: “When he worked for a 50-something chief executive, his schedule was crammed with meetings, taking up as many as 30 hours a week. When a new 20-something CEO arrived, meeting time shrank to about 2 hours a week.”

Chats/IMs/Tweets/etc. are killing meetings in some companies. And this post calls that a bad thing? Hullo? In what universe is that?

Yes, some f2f meetings are super-critical. But the amount of good meetings like that and f**king-horrible-waste-of-time meetings is outrageous. Meetings are dead, long live meetings! (Only the good and useful kind)

Working Smarter on Business Basics…Or…Time for a Rethink? HBR blogger Scott Anthony seems to think that the core problem is that business can’t seem to make money on ideas from Day 1 — an inability to capitalize and monetize ideas quickly.

For most companies, we don’t think that’s it. Although Biz Week does illustrate the power of capitalizing on innovation quickly with its story on how Google’s past employees have built, networked and invested in over 200 startups since 2005. (Key word: Past employees…The issue is retaining that innovation within companies.)

We think the core reason, for most companies, is closer to what innovation guru Clayton Christensen wrote in Biz Week: He’s writing about the healthcare debate, but substitute “business” for “healthcare” and “workforce” for “patients” and he’s made the perfect case for forbidden innovation…hacking work…

“The cause of runaway health costs is malpractice, but not the medical kind. Rather, we’re guilty of business model malpractice on a grand scale. Most caregivers in our system bring great talent and commitment to their patients. But the systems in which they work compromise quality and push up costs.”

The systems that we build to leverage people’s brilliance and innovations are broken: we think that’s what’s stopping innovation.

(…At least on TV): Tube tells us hacking is the only way to get things done. Sergeant Bilko (50s); Sergeant Rizzo/M*A*S*H (’70s-’80s); Captain Rabb/JAG (’90s-’00s); Special Agent McGee, Retired Agent Franks/NCIS (’03-). Quiz for old farts: What spy-hacker did NCIS’s “Ducky” play in the ’60s?

Wal-Mart executives’ 2009 retirement plans GREW 6.6% while their millions of employees’ plans LOST 18%! This disparity is not unique. According to multiple studies, this is happening to most employees and executives. Why hack? Because risk is not distributed evenly or fairly. You are probably bearing lots of marketplace risks while your boss’s boss is cushioned from those same risks.