There are many books about innovation but few are about Hacking Work, one such book was written by Bill Jensen and Josh Klein, Penguin Books, 2010. The authors premise is in order for the bulk of the workforce to be more productive, you have to break the stupid rules to achieve smart results. Anyone who works or has worked for a medium size or large organization knows there are many rules. If the organization is corporate, the rules were all designed for corporate decision making which is very good for the corporation. When a rule is designed this way it is a one size fits all and whoever administers the rules becomes an expert with the rules. Usually the rules are there because someone in the past has broken some which caused concern and/or losses to those who administrate the rules. Sometimes they are put in to save money on insurance premiums or government regulations or an outside agency or a previous boss who used the numbers for something. As time goes on, people accept them, find them non productive but live with them. The authors believe you should find a way around the rules, first by finding out why they are the rules exist in the first place. Then slowly changing the rules to fit your needs and finally changing them to allow you to be productive with your time at the company.

There are some wonderful examples in the book and one of them is – a person bought a franchised carpet-cleaning service. In the franchise business, the equipment is supplied and you find the customers. The person thought the tools provided were good, but not great and he began to redesigned a number of the tools in order to be closer to great. This has resulted in having an unique competitive advantage – my competitors are competing against the way I am supposed to be doing everything, not what I actually am doing. The book does not say but hopefully the carpet cleaning service implemented the new ideas across all their franchises.

In an more service environment, the process would be find the rules that drive you most crazy – either they seem to be stupid, lack common sense, and because the boss said I told you so. If they are related to technology which many are, methods such as gmail, google docs, open source Web tools are available and also know many of the solutions are to be found on the internet. Information that used to be limited to senior management is often found on the internet. For example, many organizations have an arrangement with firms to look after pension money, there are a variety of sites which list how well all pension fund investment firms are doing. You can check out how yours is doing and knowing this will help you in your financial future.

One of the reasons you will hack as the authors say is all organizations keep a very close eye on their employees, every time you sign on, how often you are not on, what you do, but translating all that information to whether you are productive or not is not perfected. You can help the process and counteract claims against you, because the information can help show you are productive and important.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, hacking work is really about the changing relationship between employers and employees. For a number of years, where most bosses came through, there was a rather straight relationship, now the relationship is changing to employees proving they are a valued asset and wish to remain working at the employer. Companies are slow to adapt, the old days where only the senior management had ideas are hopefully gone (and they spent most of the time hoping the president or the next potential president like them) to everyone in the company needs to be valued for their ideas and abilities. Companies which adapt well will continue to produce good economic returns, companies that do not will continue to lose talent (employees) to other companies because of the rules that do not make sense any more.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.