Author: Bill Jensen and Josh Klein
ISBN No: 9780 670 919 5
Review date: 07/12/2025
No of pages: 210
Publisher: Penguin
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
A manager secretly videotapes customers voicing their complaints, and posts it on Youtube. A worker who freelances with a competitor hacks a HR computer terminal so HR get the electronic contract they want, but the worker signs a document that lets him moonlight. Sacking offences? A pair of American authors hail these as ‘business hacks’ of people getting around daft shortcomings in their workplaces.
Would IT security guys freak out? You bet, the authors say. The writers hail workers for going behind the backs of their employers to improve software and processes, to make jobs better. Or, the authors reckon, ‘benevolent hacking’ gets the job done, as the ‘duct tape of the work world’. The authors give the example of Best Buy, the US electronic goods retailer setting up in the UK. Gary Koelling, director of emerging platforms, did a ‘hack’, to build BlueShirt Nation (BSN). English readers need telling that ‘blue shirts’ are the Best Buy uniformed staff. BSN is a secure social network for those 100,000 people, described as ‘Facebook inside a company … yes, they even post pictures of their cats’. Koelling says: “Corporate-supplied tools should be avoided at all costs and as much as possible.” This may bewilder heads of security, who seek to enforce – for example – bans on carrying mobile phones inside warehouses or call centres, or using only a company laptop or not transferring computer files in case of loss of data. The authors claim that doing your own thing will be forgiven, if you deliver the goods faster and better. And by the way, make the world a better place by blogging about it. The authors ask only that hackers ‘be cool’, though they are supposed to stay inside IT firewalls and never share corporate intellectual property or customer data. “The most common hacks involve moving information differently from the dictates of an approved process and connecting with people in ways outside of how the hierarchy mandates.” Whatever you make of this, it’s as well to be aware of this IT-savvy, articulate movement against what the authors call mediocre and stupid ways of working and silly SOPs (standard operating procedures).
