Three Laws of Workplace Behavior
Each of these three laws come from the findings of The Jensen Group’s ongoing study, The Search for a Simpler Way. They are undeniable patterns of behavior that occur in most workplaces, and drive how most stuff gets done — regardless of how policies, procedures, and dictates say it should get done.

LAW 2:
The Number One behavior in business today is moving to-do’s onto someone else’s plate.
In most cases, this isn’t mean-spirited or malingering. It’s merely an effective way of coping with too many to-do’s, too little time, and too few resources

The Big So What: Why should you care?

WHY EVERYONE SHOULD CARE
The old adage: before most people accept change, they go through stages of denial, grieving, bargaining, questioning, and then understanding. Who’s got time for all that? Nobody! Instead of resisting or bargaining when faced with change as well as too many to-do’s, most people just try to pass them on. (Often, to you!) This means it’s fairly easy to get you to do someone else’s to-do’s — unless you learn how to push back.

The big So What is: Learn to push back. (In ways that don’t create defensiveness.) Or else become a permanent victim of downhill to-do’s. Because everyone around you is mastering the art of parsing and pushing their to-do’s onto your plate. It’s that brutally simple.

WHY SENIOR EXECS SHOULD CARE
(If this is what you want…) There is almost no limit to how much moremoremore you can squeeze out of people, as long as you suppress pushback from below. Their universal behavior of pushing work onto someone else’s plate is like gravity…it’s a constant force that will always keep things moving for you — with little or no effort from you.

Three Laws of Workplace Behavior
Each of these three laws come from the findings of The Jensen Group’s ongoing study, The Search for a Simpler Way. They are undeniable patterns of behavior that occur in most workplaces, and drive how most stuff gets done — regardless of how policies, procedures, and dictates say it should get done.

LAW 1:
Ease of use and reduced-use-of-time are equal to — and sometimes more important than — recognition, compassion, inclusion, rewards, penalties, loyalty, and hierarchy in their ability to drive human behaviors.

The Big So What: Why should you care?

WHY EVERYONE SHOULD CARE
All your teammates are just as overloaded as you are! If you treat people’s time and attention as precious, more people will do what you ask of them more often. That means everything — from how you format your emails, to how you leave voicemails, to how you run your meetings, to how you organize documents and information — should all be designed with the guiding principle that your audience’s time is precious.

Does that sometimes mean a little more work for you? Yes. But think of it this way: The quicker
people do what you ask of them, and the faster it’s clear to them, and the more often they do it exactly as you had hoped, the easier your workload becomes! That’s the simplicity version of enlightened self interest.

WHY SENIOR EXECS SHOULD CARE
If you are user-centered — working backwards from the needs of your employees — you can drive as much change, compliance, and commitment as you currently get with traditional, top-down approaches. (If not more!) That’s the simplicity version of enlightened self interest.

Or do you turn the keys to your life, or the pen, or whatever…to someone else?
Why is it we don’t wake up to this until it’s too late?
Why do we waste so much time on stupid stuff?

Take charge of your life. Period. No excuses. Today. Now.
Why are you still reading? Go. Do. Now.

I spend a lotta time with a lotta companies working on change initiatives. Recently, during a session with a UK firm, one of the attendees said “If I ever did that, I’d be sent to [Insert Co. Name] Jail.”

While I tried to facilitate a healthy conversation (the leaders who would send this chap to Company Jail were in the room), I’m thinking… “Still? Are we still dealing with this kind of crap? This kind of politicking? Does it still exert that much power over hard-working employees?”

Apparently.

As I thought back, I saw many of my gigs fell under the same dynamic. “What about the risks that I’ll have to explain to my bosses?” was really a masked way of saying “If I ever did that, I’d be sent to [Insert Co. Name] Jail.”

“I could never delete those stupid emails and stop going to those stupid meetings…I won’t look like a team player” was really a toned-down way of saying “If I ever did that, I’d be sent to [Insert Co. Name] Jail.”

“Are you kidding me???…Respond ‘Yes, Tentative’ to meeting requests…And then don’t go? [ADVICE that Bill regularly gives to people as a tactic to get out of stupid meetings, but still look good..] …I could never do that…” was really a self-serving way of saying “If I ever did that, I would have to put myself [Insert Co. Name] Jail.”

Are any of you seeing the same thing? Why are so many of your peers putting themselves into, or worrying about [Insert Co. Name] Jail?

Aren’t there more important things to worry about than that?

We all need heroes. During October 2010, we got many. On Oct 13, the entire world cheered! After more than two months entombed half a mile beneath the Chilean desert, the last of 33 trapped miners was pulled to safety. Not only were the 33 hailed as heroes, so were the hundreds of individuals and firms from around the world you united to save them. Amazing story that many of us will remember forever!

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?

Unions are in the news a lot now. Teachers unions. Public servant unions. All because budgets need slashing and these groups make easy targets.

Let’s be clear and brutally honest: In most industrialized nations, certainly in the U.S., unions are about as relevant and useful as buggy whips and whale oil for heating and lighting. Unions are already dead. Somebody please stick a fork in them…they’re done.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m the son of a union family. Mom was a teacher, Dad was a cop, Grandpa Jack was a member of a construction engineer’s union, Uncle Don was a member of a railroad engineer’s union… the list goes on and on. I even relied on a union, the Newspaper Guild, to boost my salary to $60k when, at the time, I was only making $12k per year. Nobody could call me anti-union…at least conceptually.

But the core strategy and purpose of unions — collectively bargaining for wages and benefits — simply are outdated models in a knowledge and service work economy.

If somebody really wanted to save unions, they’d have to reinvent them:

• Focusing on the horrible state of work design. Most every process, rule, tool and procedure is corporate- or institution-centered. Nobody is the employee’s advocate in this area

• Putting hard measures and tracking behind Personal Productivity (…which is quite different from Organizational Productivity. Right now everything involved with productivity is tracked from the Organizational perspective — how efficient is the company’s use of ALL its human resources. But no one is measuring all the stupid work, complexities and inefficiencies that are offloaded onto each individual. The need for this is huge!)

• Updating “soft” issues and rights — such as healthcare, benefits and each individual’s freedoms and legal rights — to the 21st century, instead of where they are now in the mid-20th century. For example: Digital footprints. Every employee is creating completely new measurements and ways to be tracked through all of today’s devices. Who is the employee’s advocate on how their own footprint will get used? Currently no one.

I do not have a crystal ball. I do not know if unions should or will survive. But if someone wanted them to, they’d have to reinvent the core mission of unions… watching out for the rights and needs of a digitized, knowledge and service work workforce.

Turn off the whale oil lamp. Turn on the power of today.

It would be bankrupt.

It would be Chapter 11.

It would have huge signs in the window, GOING OUT OF BUSINESS.

Want to challenge that?
Fine.

How much would you… (not your boss or your company…you…) pay for all the technology you’re forced to use? (Remember that you can get by with an iPhone or Android phone, lots of free or cheap apps, and a few more integrated services that can all now go through the Cloud.)

How much would you pay for the flow chart that specified who does what in your current work process as well as the gatekeepers to enforce it? (Keeping in mind that you can crowdsource most any of that…for free, or close to it.)

How much would you pay for all that strategic thinking inside the current 2011 company plan to be “boundaryless and innovative, while at the same time cutting costs by seven thousand percent”? (Considering that most strategic plans are overwhelmingly about cutting costs, protecting the company’s ass, and low on TRUE innovation and empowerment.)

That’s what we thought.

If the design of work were a business, it would have gone out of business decades ago.

Simple, to the point. Get your head into the clouds! (Your mindset, your attitudes about change, about risk-taking, about taking charge of your career and your work…)

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!

THEY ARE CALLED LESSONS. VALUABLE LESSONS.

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.)

But unions have rules. One of them was that management couldn’t touch the type during waxing it and pasting it up. (Yes, I’m that much of a dinosaur. The paste-up people were actually linotype [hot metal type] operators who, even though the Times had just gone computerized, couldn’t be let go, and had to be trained to cut and paste waxed up type.)

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.

We’ve all heard that tired parental outburst: “Eat your parsnips. People in India are going to bed hungry.” And many of us had an equally lame retort: “Then why don’t you send them what’s on my plate.”

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.

CAREER MANAGEMENT: Shove slackers and others overboard…now!

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.

To be clear, we’re not advocating malicious actions against others, or violating your own ethics. We’re talking about the fact that all slackers and other “bad apples” are pulling you and everyone else down, and yet most companies and managers refuse to do anything about it. Time for you to step in with very appropriate actions for the situation!

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!

Universities are falling down on the job. They are failing to teach America’s college students the critical thinking skills they will so sorely need in the marketplace. This according to a recent study by the Social Science Research Council.

SSRC tracked several thousand college students’ performance on a critical thinking test from their freshman year to their senior year. About 45% showed no significant improvement after two years of college and 36% didn’t improve at all by the end of their fourth year. Woah!

Those who conducted the study as well as its critics all agree that we should be careful not to inappropriately interpret the data. A lot more work needs to be done to fully understand what these numbers mean. But the basic conclusion is undeniable: Today’s incoming workforce will likely be very challenged when it comes to critical thinking.

Industry and government gurus are concerned about high-level impacts like our country’s ability to compete in STEM fields (graduate-level work in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). My concern is far more pedestrian, widespread and horrific in its impact.

In the corporate workshops I conduct, I meet the huddled masses that work in our cubicles and shop floors. According to research by the Jensen Group, they each get about 325 pages of information every day…And to do their jobs they only need about five pages of info every day!

This is where the Critical Thinking Skills Gap comes in big time. How do they know how to scan all that fast? How do they know how to synthesize it into manageable groupings? How do they know how to compare, contrast and prioritize all that? How do they know how to 1.6% useful stuff (5 pages) from within the 98.4% noise and crap? Nobody knows how to triage their info!

Academically Adrift? Hell. Try this on for size: Business’s Daily Triage Crisis…That ain’t getting’ any better.

The majority of employees across the globe feel they no longer need to be in the office to be productive. That’s the main finding from a recent Cisco study on how the connected world of work is changing.

Among the other findings:
• Across the globe, six in ten believe they can work just as productively from home or on the move as they can in the office. India: More than nine in ten said the same thing. China: eight in ten. Brazil: three-quarters
• Cultural Mindset is a major barrier: For most companies, Presence = Productivity. Still!
• While IT wonks are most concerned with IT security, the workforce feels that corporate policies themselves are the obstacles and that security is just an excuse for inertia.

Said Cisco’s Marie Hattar: “It is clear from the research findings that the desire among employees to be more mobile and flexible in their work lifestyles is extremely strong throughout the world – as strong as salary.”

Sooooooo…Are you gonna wait for IT and C-Suite execs to finally “get” it? Or are you gonna start benevolently hacking to create the kind of environment you need?

Back in the social media dark ages (2002), good friend Tom Davenport wrote a seminal book, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. In it, he declared that the most significant problem in today’s business world is not competition, lack of skilled employees or an uncertain economy, but attention deficit. We’re all ADD and everyone is competing for our attention.

Anyone who’s lived through the past few years doesn’t need to be told about how much worse the battle for our attention has gotten!

Now, in a redux of Davenport’s efforts, software production manager Goran Kimovski (Kima) writes a blog piece (…natch…shorter than a book for short attention spans!…) in which he makes sure we “get it.” In the Attention Economy, you have to earn people’s attention. It’s all about adding value — and each individual gets to define value in their own way.

Says Kima:
• “No, you’re not annoying, just boring! Attention is the new currency in our world and you need to offer something in exchange if you want me to listen to you. Telling me what to do, how to do it, when to do it doesn’t cut it anymore. Teaching me old solutions for old problems doesn’t inspire me anymore. I get what I need to learn to cope in this world from other places!”
• “My kids are taught rules, I teach them when to break them! My kids are taught to listen, I teach them to dream! My kids are taught to behave, I teach them to have fun! My kids are taught to remember solutions, I teach them how to spot problems!”

The key to value lies not in technology, not even in grabbing people’s attention. It’s further upstream.

The key to adding, creating and determining value in the Attention Economy lies in what we teach our kids and our workforce. Are we teaching them to be judicious editors and scanners? Are we teaching them to heighten their critical thinking skills? And are we teaching all that less through instruction and more by leading by example?

For two decades I’ve been studying the biggest sources of work complexity and biggest time-wasters in your day. For many years, certain results have continued to trend the same:
• Email is either the number one or two time-waster in most people’s work-days
• Unclear, unfocused, useless communication is costing you at least two hours per day, sometimes up to four. That’s 30 to 60 days per year you’re losing.

Now comes a new survey by Star, a UK-based computing/communications firm, that found 1 in 5 UK workers spend 32 days per year just to manage their email! Mind you, that’s not using the information they get…that’s just managing their in-box and all the sub-folders!

Here are the highlights from what that means to you and your company (just the bottom line…the math/formulas are available here):
• That costs the company about $15,625 per employee per year, just in cost-outlay!
• Additionally, that costs about $6,250 per employee in lost revenues, because that’s time that can’t be spend on revenue-producing work

Now, unfortunately, the only solution that techies come up with is better data management. Wrong!!! While better tech/info management is certainly key…the overwhelming majority of what needs to change is to make better choices about how we spend our time and what we spend it on.

Email does not control you! You control it!

In this excellent post, Laura Seargeant Richardson of Frog Design lays out the future of work by tackling what’s wrong with education and what’s right with play. Fast forward from tykes and toys to laborers in the workforce and everything still applies.

“When 85 percent of today’s companies searching for creative talent can’t find it,” she asks, “will more focus on standardized curriculum, testing, and memorization provide the skills an emergent workforce needs? Not likely. Play is our greatest natural resource. In the end, it comes down to playing with our capacity for human potential. Why would we ever want to limit it?” Why indeed.

The guiding principles and approaches that must apply both at work and in education:
1. Open Environments. Both physical and virtual. Great examples exist in play — Webkinz World, LEGO Mindstorms, Kerpoof and more. Where are the open environments we need to solve project management and customer satisfaction challenges?
2. Flexible Tools. Where hacking workarounds is a built-in capability instead of a pre-prescribed path that must always follow the creator’s plan. Sound familiar? Yeah, I think Josh and Bill wrote an entire book about that!
3. Modifiable Rules. Ditto. Again: Results matter and crucial rules (like those about values and legal compliance) do matter. But how many great games are designed to ensure that all players succeed only in the way that the creator mandates? Work has a lot to learn in this area.
4. Superpowers. Power. Control. Risk. Kids learn best when they have a chance to wield gaming power and test their personal strategies. And so do workers.

As Richardson concludes, “In the future, economies won’t just be driven by financial capital, but by play capital as well.” Epic advice, for education and working.

With all the bad news about hacking these days, isn’t it nice to know that there are amazing people out there doing amazing things for people in need?

That’s the idea behind Random Hacks of Kindness, a global collaborative of techies that bring the brightest hackers together to volunteer their time to solve real-world problems. Techies from NASA, the World Bank, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and more work on solutions such as Carrot, a resource management tool that helps NGOs coordinate their efforts during natural disasters…and like I’m OK!, an app that can be pre-loaded into one’s mobile phone and sends out messages to pre-defined lists if you’re ever in one of those disasters.

Hackers helping real people in needs…Now that’s what we’re talkin’ ’bout!

According to this latest report by IBM Institute for Business Value, Analytics is the new path to value — apparently, “the smartest organizations are embedding analytics to transform insights into action.”

For the unwashed and uninitiated (most of us), analytics is the pseudo-science of mining data to use your own information to get you to do stuff. For example, grocery stores use analytics to place diapers and beer near each other on certain days at certain times — because their data reveal that men buy diapers and beer in the same store-run at those times…and placing them near each other will actually increase sales of both items. Yeah…really.

But analytics don’t stay outside of the workplace. In Hacking Work, Josh and I declare that capturing those internal analytics are one of the four driving forces that will shape the employee/employer relationship for decades to come. Business’s next battle for control over you is aggressively capturing and monitoring your own digital footprint.

Among the new and coming turf-wars, once your employer has enough of your own data:
• Your average response times to emails, voicemails, IMs and tweets — broken down by customers, co-workers, and supervisors
• Your most productive days of the week and most productive times of the day (determined solely by corporate needs and demands)
• Who’s in your social network, which of them helped you most last year (determined solely by corporate needs and demands), and which helped you the least
• Whether or not you are using corporate-mandated tools and information in the exact ways that the company prescribed…
• And much more…will all be used to get you to do behave in certain ways

Depending on one’s point of view, the best and worst of the employee/employer relationship is yet to come. It could be the best: where companies use all that data to help you be your best. But based on the trends we’re seeing, the best is going to be extremely rare. Mostly, we believe, the perfecting of analytics and the capturing of your digital footprint will be used as a Dark Force — simply to find more ways to make employees do what employers want them to do.

Wolf in sheep’s clothing? Mostly: We believe that’s the case. …Lamb stew anyone?

Josh and I wrote Hacking Work to help push for changes in power and control in workplaces because our tools and infrastructure have become more bossy than our bosses, and that has to change. Two recent trips shine a light on the fact that sometimes the transition can get messy. Nevertheless it’s time to get on with it.

While in the UK recently, I witnessed the launch of a five year celebration honoring the Magna Carta, the Great Charter of Freedoms.

The Magna Carta is arguably one of the most significant documents in history in establishing obligations and freedoms between those in power and the populous. A century and a half after William the Conqueror centralized and organized power in England the monarchy had grown so powerful that the land-owners revolted. In 1215, their Magna Carta laid the foundation for many future bills of rights, constitutions, and limitations and responsibilities for those in power.

I have also had the opportunity to view one of the original copies, made in 1297, in Australia’s Parliament House. Given the significance of this document, I assumed I would encounter crowds of people and armed guards. Instead, I saw it by myself in a hallway viewing area that seemed more fit for a high school science project, which was right next to a coat check room, with a hurricane sound in the background from one of those industrial blowers because there was a leak in the ceiling a few feet from the document and the carpet was soaked.

Expect that kind of Magna Carta-ish experience when discussing how corporate senior executives will need to transition from today’s approaches to business to infrastructures that are as user(worker)-centered as they are corporate-centered. Important and meaningful conversations, but also pedestrian, messy, noisy, and not a lot of reverence. Within those noisy discussions are certain to be pearls of wisdom — hard-won advice from your fellow hackers on how to bring about much-needed changes.

Bring on the noise!

SIDE TRIP
About The Magna Carta
> The Magna Carta, meaning Great Charter, is not just one document. It is a number of them, from different dates, all referred to under the same collective name
> Publication has its origins in a dispute between King John and English barons, and it went some way towards limiting the king’s authority
> The first document was sealed – not signed – in 1215 by King John at Runnymede. The final one was issued in 1300
> 17 versions survive from the 13th Century
> The charter guaranteed basic freedoms and property rights to “free men”
> The Magna Carta was re-negotiated on four occasions within the first decade of its existence, as both the king and England’s earls, bishops and barons all attempted to redefine its terms

HR GROWS A PAIR: Finally! HR Becomes An Employee Advocate

Bad-Ass Hack: HR Adopts, Champions and Tracks New Organizational Measure: “How easy is it for me to do great work?”: HR finally gets that the new collaborative tools are the operating system for talent in the 21st century. It finally gets that HR has been MIA when it comes to being a workforce advocate, and it’s time to grow a pair. HR’s early 21st century role is to make it a lot easier for everyone to do a lot more great work.

What Makes This Hack Bad-Ass: In theory, HR is supposed to have three primary roles: 1. Strategic Partner to the senior execs, focused on delivering business goals. 2. Employee Advocate, focused on ensuring that their workforce is the company’s strongest competitive advantage. 3. Change Champion, focused on helping everyone in the organization change at the pace and in ways that meet the needs of a competitive marketplace.

Yet, in reality (…of course, with the stellar exceptions that everyone cites…), HR is mainly a cost-cutting, reactive advocate for short-term changes, under-performing on the strategic needs of the C-suite, and a no-show when it comes to being an Employee Advocate. And when it comes to growing a pair: When was the last time you heard of an HR exec going toe-to-toe w/ a superior to push hard and relentlessly for his/her employee’s needs? Exactly.

How It Could Save Business’s Ass: The workforce needs to get shit done. Faster. Better. Smarter. Yeah, we all know that. But the way that most every company approaches this need keeps everyone working harder, not smarter. If HR actually stepped in as the workforce’s advocate and made it easier to do great work, most everyone would be working smarter.

In most every company, there are way too many barriers to doing great work.

According to the Jensen Group’s Search for a Simpler Way, among the biggest barriers:
• Usability and user-centered design of tools, processes: Only 27% Favorable
• Speed in addressing bottom-up needs: Only 21% Favorable
• Appropriate, effective use of each individual’s time: Only 12% Favorable
Only 12% favorable in how we use people’s time!?! Where is HR on this? Who is the employee’s advocate on this?

If the workforce had an advocate on these and similar issues, most of the barriers to MoreBetterFaster would be addressed. This is why the top of the list of Best Companies to Work For, are all adopting some variation of “How easy is it for me to do great work?” as a central corporate measure. Removing barriers to great work is the work of a great company.

Potential Downsides: HR execs, be forewared: If you grow a pair at a company that doesn’t appreciate that, you might actually have to find a better company to work for.

Suggestions for Getting Started:
1. Download Jensen’s Simpler Company Starter Kit
2. Use the Survey Tool to assess your own organization’s barriers to great work
3. Use Your Own Data to start a new conversation w/ C-Suite execs about making it easier to do great work
4. Kick Ass: Become a true Employee Advocate

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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!