Hacking Work: Breaking Stupid Rules for Smart Results [Hardcover]

Bill Jensen (Author), Josh Klein (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 23, 2010

Why work harder than you have to? One manager kept his senior execs happy by secretly hacking into the company's database to give them the reports they needed in one third of the time. Hacking is a powerful solution to every stupid procedure, tool, rule, and process we are forced to endure at the office. Benevolent hackers are saving business from itself.

It would be so much easier to do great work if not for lingering bureaucracies, outdated technologies, and deeply irrational rules and procedures. These things are killing us.

Frustrating? Hell, yes. But take heart-there's an army of heroes coming to the rescue.

Today's top performers are taking matters into their own hands: bypassing sacred structures, using forbidden tools, and ignoring silly corporate edicts. In other words, they are hacking work to increase their efficiency and job satisfaction. Consultant Bill Jensen teamed up with hacker Josh Klein to expose the cheat codes that enable people to work smarter instead of harder. Once employees learn how to hack their work, they accomplish more in less time. They cut through red tape and circumvent stupid rules.

For instance, Elizabeth's bosses wouldn't sign off on her plan to improve customer service. So she made videotapes of customers complaining about what needed fixing and posted them on YouTube. Within days, public outcry forced senior management to reverse its decision.

Hacking Work reveals powerful technological and social hacks and shows readers how to apply them to sidestep bureaucratic boundaries and busywork. It's about making the system work for you, not the other way around, so you can take control of your workload, increase your productivity, and help your company succeed-in spite of itself.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The way we're working today sucks. If you've realized that fact, and your organization isn't doing anything about it, Hacking Work will help you achieve your results and not go insane waiting for those around you to wake up."
-Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, cocreators of the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) and coauthors of Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It

"Anyone frustrated by burdensome rituals and processes can now take responsibility for their own success. Jensen and Klein irreverently and cleverly show us the power of hacking work and taking responsibility for one's own success. The ideas within Hacking Work will foster the innovation and creativity so badly needed in these times."
-Dave Ulrich, professor, Ross School of Business, and coauthor of The Why of Work

"Hacking Work is a refreshing antidote to what passes for business wisdom today. Sure, organizations need structure and processes. But to get your work done, you need this book. It's the perfect manual for long-overdue corporate insurgency. Find a way to hide it on your expense account!"
-Thomas H. Davenport, President's Distinguished Professor of IT and Management, Babson College, and coauthor of Analytics at Work

"The time has come to accept that our outdated business precepts are unraveling. Jensen and Klein reveal a new hope: businesses succeeding and innovating in spite of themselves. A brave new world is upon us-we can embrace it and excel or deny it and die."
-Jim McCarthy, consultant and former EVP, Strategic Development, CITGO Petroleum

"Hacking Work is a badly needed wake-up call urging executives to remove the manifold limitations standing in the way of true innovation. This book could not be more timely: As our economies move out of recession, it is high time to question and redesign every aspect of doing business that creates obstacles to competitiveness."
-Jean-Daniel Gerber, State Secretary, Ministry of the Economy, Switzerland

About the Author

Bill Jensen is President and CEO of the Jensen Group (www.simplerwork.com). Founded in 1985, this change-consulting firm helps Fortune 500 clients apply the principles of simplicity to business management and work design. Hacking Work is his fifth book.Bill speaks and conducts workshops around the globe on changing how we work. He lives in Morristown, New Jersey.

Josh Klein hacks institutions, computer networks, hardware, and animal behavior. He consults for groups such as Microsoft, Oracle, Nokia, and the U.S. intelligence community. He lives in New York. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover (September 23, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159184357X
• ISBN-13: 978-1591843573
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,033,170 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Boring, Repetitive, Ethically Questionable February 12, 2012

By bagz12

Format:Hardcover

I picked this book up hoping to gain some insight on customizing my work environment. I was expecting some useful anecdotes and strategies to accomplish this. Instead I found the information in this book rather simplistic, lacking in useful details, and repetitive.

The basic advice on hacking your work processes or relationships to improve your (and your company's) performance is valid and potentially useful but the entire book is written with the assumption that the reader works in a grey-walled, soul-sucking institution. The problem is that most of the people who might pick up a book like this no longer work in those grey-walled, soul-sucking institutions. We've moved on and we've been hacking our work all along.

Now I don't mind if a book reinforces ideas and practices I already follow as long as there is some new insight or a novel discussion of the subject. But I found the advice and anecdotes in this book wavering between very weak and obvious to ethically questionable and not much in between. On top of that the structure of the book was highly repetitive. Do I really need to read a one-page summary of the key points discussed in each and every 10-15 page chapter? Many sections of the book felt like padding to try and get the book to that magical 200 pages that business books seem to need to reach nowadays. They did mention building a hacker's toolkit of technology and techniques to help you in your quest; The one thing that may have held some useful nuggets for me. But the authors ultimately dodge the problem of discussing actual tools and techniques stating that everyone's toolkit is unique. Sure they discuss a couple things like Gmail, Google Docs, and Basecamp but if these are revelations to the reader then I'd like to pass along a message, "AOL called, they want their _1000 hours of Internet Access_ disc back. You still have it, right?"

To be fair I found myself cringing at only one or two examples that I found ethically questionable. For example, one anecdote is about an employee who hacked his company's expenses process by submitting a Mint transaction report along with fake purchase receipts. You read that right, *fake* receipts generated by a website that will happily sell you whatever fake receipts you might need. The logic is that this gets this employee out of collecting and managing his actual receipts or filling out his tedious expense request form. I suppose this employee only generates fake receipts for actual business purchases but when you have the ability to generate a receipt for practically anything you live pretty close to fraud-ville. Whether or not the fake receipts represent real purchases a financial auditor and Uncle Sam make not look too highly on the practice. But we're supposed to be questioning authority here, right? Silly laws, who needs em?

Another example was in a section that asked the question "Benevolent of Over the Edge?" One person placed a filter into their email system that would send her copies of emails mentioning her name that were not addressed to her. Tampering with email communications like that is, at minimum, ethically questionable and quite likely criminal in many countries. What? Wire-tapping is a felony, really? There is no guidance on this anecdote, the reader is left to consider the implications. I suppose if your moral compass defines "illegal" as "when you get caught" then this example might be useful but I hope the authors included that anecdote as an example of over-reaching during a hack.

All in all this book was wasted time for me. This could all have been written in one or two LifeHacker articles. If I can save one person two hours of their life then this review has been worth it.

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The power and impact of benevolent hacking in the workplace September 23, 2010

By Robert Morris HALL OF FAMETOP 100 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

To what does the title of this book refer? According to the co-authors, Bill Jensen and Josh Klein, "Today's top performers are taking matters into their own hands. They are bypassing sacred structures and breaking all sorts of rules just to get their work done...Every day in every workplace, benevolent rule breakers like these are ensuring that business succeeds despite itself. They are reinventing how to approach productivity and how to consistently achieve morebetterfaster results." Jensen and Klein urge their reader to start hacking: "Start taking the usual ways of doing things and work around them to produce improved results. Bend the rules for the good of all. That's what benevolent hackers do."

In his book Iconoclast, Gregory Berns explains, "The overarching theme of this book is that iconoclasts are able to do things that others say can't be done, because iconoclasts perceive things differently than other people." Berns goes on to explain that the difference in perception "plays out in the initial stages of an idea. It plays out in how their manage their fears, and it manifests in how they pitch their ideas to the masses of noniconoclasts. It is an exceedingly rare individual who possesses all three of these traits." In her article "How to Walk on the Leading Edge without Falling off the Cliff," Judith A. Neal calls these bold and principled people "Edgewalkers" whose dominant characteristics include visionary consciousness (they have a sense of mission about something greater than themselves), multicultural responsiveness (they can understand the nuances of different worlds or cultures), intuitive sensitivity (they are natural futurists who constantly integrate ideas and information from a variety of sources, risk-taking confidence (they have a strong sense of adventure and experimentation), and self-awareness (they understand and appreciate that each person is a unique microcosm of the whole). Benevolent hackers, values-driven iconoclasts, and Edgewalkers are kindred spirits.

Throughout their narrative, Jensen and Klein explain how to determine what to hack, how to hack effectively with benevolence, how to obtain the resources needed, how to sustain support of change initiatives, and how to support others' hacking. They provide "A Short History of Hacking's Journey from Good to Bad to Good" (Pages 15-16), discuss "Top Five Hacks That We'd Recommend That Everyone Do" (Pages 47-48) and how to proceed with each (Pages 53-54), they identify and discuss Hacking's "Ten Commandments" (Pages 59-65), then identify and discuss "Four Emerging Forces Where Hackers Will Influence the Outcomes" (Pages 88-113), then "Five Big Ideas" for a Boss to consider (Pages 132-255), and explain how and why a hacker must work differently (Pages 164-171) and lead differently (Pages 172-181).

All of the information, insights, and recommendations are based on more than 4,000 "benevolent hacking case studies." The material is anchored in real-world situations that suggest practical applications of key concepts. Jensen and Klein should also be commended on their brilliant use of reader-friendly devices such as Sidetrips (supplementary digressions), Smartstarts (key takeaways and recommended action steps), and Fasthacks (real-world examples that illustrate key points). As I read this book, I reflected back on all the organizations and on all the leaders with which I have been associated. When doing so, I realized that Jensen and Klein wrote the book for supervisors as well as for those for whom they are responsible.

In the ideal workplace, supervisors and their direct reports either hack or support those who do. However, more often than not, aspiring hackers are in fact inept politicians and supervisors who remain hostage to -- and are perhaps zealous defenders of -- what James O'Toole so aptly characterizes as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom." Here in a single volume is just about everything aspiring benevolent hackers and their supervisors need to know in order to co-create answers to their organization's most important business questions and co-create solutions to its most serious problems. Congratulations to Bill Jensen and Josh Klein on a brilliant achievement. Bravo!

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "Best Book I Have Read All Year...Seriously!" September 23, 2010

By Paul R. Williams

Format:Hardcover

"There's an underground army of benevolent hackers out there who are saving business from itself, one bad act at a time. This is their story." - Excerpt from Hacking Work by Bill Jensen and Josh Klein

And with that statement to begin my literary journey...I was hooked. No, seriously...I read the book in one sitting. It isn't often that a book is so well written, speaks directly to my passion and makes such profound common sense that I simply cannot put it down until I have consumed the whole thing. This is one of those very special exceptions!

Enough with the gushing...let's get to the heart of book's concept. Here's the premise as it was shared with me in an email by co-author Bill Jensen: Business is broken. Nobody's gonna fix it except you. (Each of us.) And to fix it, we're gonna have to break some very stupid rules.

Breaking these stupid rules is akin to "hacking" in the IT vernacular. In other words, fixing a broken system without any real permission because it is apparent no one else is willing or able to do so. Thus the name, Hacking Work.

Look, there are examples ad nauseum in the business world of bureaucratic rules, systems, policies and procedures that no longer serve any legitimate business purpose, if they ever really did at all. But they linger on...festering...killing efficiency...protected by corporate anti-bodies looking to maintain the status quo...getting in your way of getting the work done.

But the fix is simple. Change the process. Work around the procedure. Ignore the rule. In essence...hack work.

This book is filled with example after example of broken work systems "fixed" by brave employees who were willing to stand up to the status quo and change what needed to be changed. Yes, this concept of hacking requires bravery and a little bit of insanity. You could get fired. But what happens more often, these brave hackers are recognized for their initiative to patch a hole, right a wrong or simply just make everyone's workday a bit easier and simpler.

Hacking Work is a book written after my own passion. When faced with a process that doesn't work...fix it or ignore it. Don't be a lemming!