8/8/2019 Hacking Work, Learn to Love the Rule Breakers

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Hacking

Work

Bill Jensen and Josh Klein

Learn to love the

rule breakers

7

The Problem

hen a twelve-year-

old can gather inor-

mation aster, process

it more efciently, re-

erence more diverse

proessionals, and get volunteer guidancerom better sources than you can at work,

how can you pretend to be competitive?

When the personal tools in your mobile

phone are more empowering than what

your company provides or approves or

W

PeoPle ManageMent

Hbr.org

8/8/2019 Hacking Work, Learn to Love the Rule Breakers

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The pmse This kind o workaround

isnt newyour company has been hacked

rom the inside or ages. What is new is

that the cheat codes are becoming public,

and theres nothing you can do about that.

Bloggers are telling your employees howto bypass procedures. Forums give tutori-

als on how to hack your sotware security.

Entrepreneurs are building apps to help

your employees run their own tools and

processes instead o yours.

The only successul strategy or a hacked

world: I you cant beat em, join em.

Change the debate within your companyto leverage what your hackers know. Were

seeing managers in enormous corporations

like Google, Nokia, and Best Buy embrace

what benevolent hackers would pursue

with or without them: greater worker con-

trol over tools and procedures, increased

transparency, and meritocracy. As even se-

nior management begins to eel the pain ooutdated tools and structures that reuse to

budge, what was once shunned as bad is

now the new good.

ecutives cried out, Reports! Our kingdom

or more reports! The problem was that

what they really wanteduseul, insightul

analysiscouldnt easily be produced with

the sotware provided by corporate IT.

Poor Richard. What to do? Work 29hours a day, 10 days a week, to manually

create those reports and the much-needed

analysis? No way. He hacked the system.

He sotened up a vendor, got a password ,

tapped into the database, and began creat-

ing never-beore-possible reports or the

C-suite.

Would the banks auditors and IT secu-rity guys reak out i they knew that Rich-

ard had hacked their system? Uh, yes. But

since then, Richard has become incredibly

productive and is now a go-to guy compa-

nywide. Hes a hero to all those senior execs

who wanted more than data dumps. I only

they knew the ull story. Says Richard, As

a result o this hack, I keep senior manage-ment o our backs, so were able to con-

tinue doing more or our clients with less.

Hes not alone in believing that he has to

take matters into his own hands to get the

job done and achieve better results or the

organization. Many in the workorce are

coming to the same conclusion. The illu-

sion o corporate control is being shatteredin the name o increased personal produc-

tivity.

B J h d d ceo hJ g, h- f

m, n Jy. J K hd y d v. th dd hh , Hacking Work: Saving Business

from Itself, One Bad Act at a Time (p).

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