Bill Jensen - Hacking Work: Breaking Stupid Rules for Smart Results

For several years we have foraged in the back alleys of business, arranging clandestine meetings with the bad boys and girls of work. Empty cans of Red Bull, pizza crusts, and shredded nondisclosure agreements littered our meeting places.

Psssssst. How do you really get everything done? What are your work-arounds? The ones that keep your company afloat, keep customers happy, teammates employed, and keep you doing your best? We want the world to know about the power of benevolent hacking.

Who are we, and why do that? Were just two guys who have dedicated our professional lives to finding work-arounds to corporate bullshit.

Bills day job is making it easier to get stuff done. Over the course of two decades, he has asked over five hundred thousand people around the world what makes their work so hard and complicated. C-suite dwellers love his findings on simplicity. Bill advises executives and their troops on how to work smarter by making work simpler. He has consulted with many of the biggest companies in the world, local and federal governments, even the U.S. Navy SEALs.

But Bills most important advice has always hit a brick wall. His research has consistently found that the number one source of work complexity is built into every companys infrastructurethe tools and processes we are supposed to use to get our work done. They are designed to help the company succeed but are not built for the success of the individuals who do the work.

Businesss failure to deal with this obvious problem is one of its biggest problems. Yet the reaction from most graybeards has been decidedly chilly: Lets not go there.

Arrrrgh! How do I get these people to listen? Bill wondered. Addressing this problem would be game changing a true competitive advantage for every company and the end of so much frustration and wasted effort for every individual.

The answer finally appeared over drinks at a TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference. Change the approach, said Josh, who had just presented how he had hacked the work ethic of crows by training the birds to bring him money. If their executives wont listen, lets show employees how to hack around their problems.

From his early days of snarfing Wi-Fi passwords in Seattle to his recent consulting work with U.S. intelligence agencies, Josh has been hacking technologies and putting them back together to great effect. Some years ago, he noticed that this kind of systems thinking could be applied to people and organizations, not just to technology.

As he helped companies all over the world make the most of their technologies, Josh saw firsthand how unwilling people are to question what they take for grantedand how powerful it can be to do so. From megacorporations to start-ups, from investors to students, he found that while everyone talked about innovation, few were willing to pull the trigger that would kill an old business model or to embrace the changes that would create a new one.