How to break the rules to work better

At http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17930995

3 May 2012 Last updated at 23:01 GMT

Hacking work: How to break the rules to work better

 

Viewpoint by Josh Klein Author, Hacking work

Buck the system: Hacking work - finding ways round restrictive systems in the workplace - has risks but could benefit your whole company, says Josh Klein

"Hacking" means to reassemble a system to produce a different or superior result.

"Work" has long meant a series of highly structured, heavily bureaucratic processes through which financial value is derived from human labour.

The former is more popular than ever before in human history due to widespread access to information, expertise and instruction via the internet - and the latter? Well, the latter is on the way out.

Call it "agile" or "iterative," "innovating" or "pivoting", call it "freelancing" or "outsourced."

It's the ugly truth that globalisation and technology are creating a workforce that can move faster, think quicker, and produce newer/better than the large corporations which purport to retain them.

The result of this upsurge of independents, when combined with all this freely available computational capability and information access that now resides in the cloud, is the complete reworking of "work."

Employment is being hacked, and increasingly, it's being hacked in the interest of the smaller/faster upstarts whose insight large companies so require. So what's to be done?

Join them.

If your company is suffering from inefficiencies, lack of insight, stagnation, or outmoding of any kind, the answer lies right in front of you in the form of those iconoclasts who are so busily rewriting the rules of your formerly staid marketplaces.

As an exercise, try some of these:

• Find one hated piece of software you're "required" to use and Google a workaround; use Google Docs instead of Excel, Drop Box instead of Sharepoint, or whatever it is you're saddled with. Try it for a week or two. See how much more efficient you are.
• Write a list of the most obviously bad policies in your company and identify what easy, free, or cheap solutions exist that might address them. Put a monetary value on how much the company would save if you used one or more of those solutions. Pitch it to your boss.

• Ask your 10-year-old nephew or 15-year-old niece what they think is wrong with your recent ad campaign or car design or performance evaluation. Take their answer seriously and consider how you could implement their solutions. 
  

• Set up a wiki (a web page anyone can edit) that allows for anonymous contributions. Encourage your co-workers to participate in problem solving on the wiki and see where it gets you.
• Poke around online for ways to hack the one piece of hardware that pains you the most. Jailbreak your phone so you can put better software on it. Flash the firmware on your wi-fi router so you can ensure your team gets good bandwidth. Put a piece of tape over the webcam your boss uses to surreptitiously spy on you and your peers.

What's the common thread here? Hacking.

It's breaking the rules, typically in small ways, to net you greater efficiency from the working systems you're stuck... ( more at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17930995
)