Book Summary: Hacking Work – Breaking Stupid Rules for Smart Results by Bill Jensen and Josh Klein
In business, infrastructure equals money. In order to scale, you need a flexible infrastructure to handle the growth. With that said, when centralized infrastructure adopt me hack turns into bureaucracy and slow response, the company becomes lethargic. Hacking work examines these problems from the workers standpoint and outlines things you can do to get your work done by working smart.
Why is this important to me?
I am not doing this summary to waste your time. It is my vision to provide concise action steps that you can adopt right now to reach your entrepreneurial goals. Most companies today trust their vendors and customers more than their employees. This is a real problem because brilliant results require team work and you cannot have a cohesive team if there is no trust. Companies want transparency and centralization similar to command and control systems. This is not a bad thing until it takes a sales man 2 hours to enter an order or if the company blocks Facebook, twitter and LinkedIn. Stupid actions like this kill results.
Results are the name of the game. If you do not get results NOW, you are dead. The hub and spoke model for business is not a bad model just as long as the spokes have autonomy to deliver to the customers and are not tied up by bureaucracy.
Hacking work is broken down into four sections. For the sake of time, I will highlight one point from each section.
- Engaged Team Members – This one point sums up the whole book and separates great businesses from crappy ones. Engaged team members are four times more productive and profitable than disengaged team members. This statistic if focused on can transform any business.
- Slaves to Infrastructure – I understand the need for procedures and infrastructure because you cannot scale without it. With that said, I know that larger companies handcuff their employees with ridiculous rules and procedures that ultimately kill the creative spirit. Hacking Work is all about working around these ridiculous rules and procedures. A simple example of this would be locking down file transfer access from one computer to the next. People today can have access to everything outside their work from their phone. Having stupid policies in place to limit creative freedom for the illusion of security is bad policy.