Hacking Work: Breaking Stupid Rules for Smart Results

Written by Bill Jensen and Josh Klein

Narrated by Walter Dixon

Why work harder than you have to? One manager kept his senior execs happy by secretly hacking into the company's database, providing them the reports they needed in one-third the time. Hacking is a powerful solution to every stupid procedure, tool, rule, and process we are forced to endure. Benevolent hackers are saving business from itself.

It would be so much easier to do great work if not for lingering bureaucracies, outdated technologies, and deeply irrational rules and procedures. These things are killing us. Frustrating? Hell, yes.

But take heart-there's an army of heroes coming to the rescue. Today's top performers are taking matters into their own hands: bypassing sacred structures, using forbidden tools, and ignoring silly corporate edicts. In other words, they are hacking work to increase their efficiency and job satisfaction.

Consultant Bill Jensen teamed up with hacker Josh Klein to expose the cheat codes that enable people to work smarter instead of harder. Once employees learn how to hack their work, they accomplish more in less time. They cut through red tape and circumvent stupid rules. It's about making the system work for you, so you can take control of your workload, increase your productivity, and help your company succeed-in spite of itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ascent Audio
• Release date: Sep 27, 2010
• ISBN: 9781596596788

Bill Jensen

Bill Jensen is an internationally recognized speaker with twenty-five years of experience in consulting. The author of Simplicity, Work 2.0, and other titles, he is also CEO of The Jensen Group.

Reviews for Hacking Work

[jonathangorman_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I was torn on whether or not to even review this book. On one hand, it could be useful as a book to help inspire and bolster someone's confidence to take more risks and to be more willing to work around problems in a business. On the other hand, it doesn't deal with concrete examples and also doesn't really make it clear how to do more fundamental changes to the infrastructure, seeming to assume that the hacks would make people so amazingly productive ti would just happen.I can't help but wonder though if businesses behave as badly as they're often portrayed why we should keep bolstering and supporting these businesses. if one is truly the vaguely defined "hacker" the authors postulate, might it not be better to break away from the companies entirely? One of the biggest problems for me is the book just feels off. It's mostly because of the writing style of the authors, which to me scream business consultants. Touchy feely, full of promise, but at the same time somehow missing that people have been doing this for a long, long time. It also falls in the the trap of being far too generalized and full of random anecdotes and hard to believe statistics. I think this could be a great book for some folks, but part of me wishes I had not picked it back up after the first time I started reading it.