Hacking Work by Bill Jensen & Josh Klein & Bill Jensen & Josh Klein

Author:Bill Jensen & Josh Klein & Bill Jensen & Josh Klein
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141965666
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2010-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

FORCE 4:

RADICAL TRANSPARENCY GROWS EVERYWHERE

What’s changing? We’re living through the largest increase in expressive capability in human history.

What will be different because of the change? Even command-and-control structures have now been democratized. No one’s voice can be blocked. Everyone’s views on their tools and work structures will be heard. That impacts all decisions about all work designs.

Who gains, who loses? If you’re stuck in a traditional nontransparent company, hacking will get you unstuck. But ideally, seek out only those companies that really understand the value of transparency and deep employee engagement.

IT WAS JUST DAYS BEFORE IRANIAN PROTESTERS would take to the streets in June 2009. Just before they would tweet and post on Facebook and YouTube that which the Iranian government did not want the world to see. Some of it horrified us all.

Nine days before the disputed election in Iran, Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, adjunct professor at New York University, and a prescient voice on the Internet’s effects on society, spoke at the U.S. State Department—the same government agency that would soon ask Twitter to postpone a planned upgrade so that Iranian citizens could tweet their experiences to the world.

Shirky: “These tools don’t get … interesting until they get technologically boring. It isn’t when the shiny new tools show up that their uses start permeating society, it’s when everybody can start taking them for granted. Now that media is increasingly social, innovation can happen anywhere… . We’re starting to see a media landscape in which innovation is happening everywhere and moving from one spot to another. That is a huge transformation. The moment we’re living through is the largest increase in expressive capability in human history.”

Shirky then closed with critical advice to all who would listen: “The audience can talk back, but that’s not the really crazy change. The really crazy change is the fact that they [your audience] are no longer disconnected from each other … [they] can talk directly to each other. The choice we face now is how can we make best use of this media even though it means changing the way we’ve always done it.”10

To give you an idea about how far we have yet to go to live up to Shirky’s advice: While Iranians were free to tweet from the streets during the 2009 crisis, aides to key decision makers in Washington, D.C., had to run out to their parking lots to view those tweets on their mobile phones because access to Twitter was restricted within their buildings and on their computers.

Business has yet to learn some very critical lessons. A decade before Shirky stood before the State Department, four gadfly authors took business to task in The Cluetrain Manifesto: “Markets are conversations. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.”11

That’s a transformational idea that the entire wired population has adopted with a vengeance. (For quick tours of how everyone everywhere has jumped all over this, check out the videos “Did You Know 4.

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