TEDxDUBLIN - Josh Klein - Hacking Work

I'm really excited to be here today to talk to you guys about this topic because when me and my co-author started with this topic it was for people like you or with people like you in mind the kind of people that are willing to innovate they were aren't willing to be complacent with the things that are broken around them and they're willing to break a little bit of you know a few rules to get things to be better I started with this whole project some years ago when a friend of mine got his dream job and the trials and tribulations that he had led me to understand that work is broken and there's a variety of reasons that I think this is so and the first of them is that are the tools that we have now really suck if you think about it and if you're in a large company or in a big bureaucracy or even if you're working in a small company there's probably some tools you have that aren't very good my favorite example of this is ie six Internet Explorer six you remember well you remember that the web browser they built it back in 2001 it's now a classic example in computer science courses of what bad software looks like it's full of bugs it's it crashes all the time and it's got enormous security holes so if you're trying to get people's credit card numbers high six is the thing to use strangely enough I six is also the second most popular browser in the world today thank you the corporate world right now this is odd but if you think about it it makes a little bit of sense a recent survey that was done showed that 58% of employees said that their number one criteria in choosing software was ease of use but if you interview their bosses the managers the people that actually buy the software they almost universally said that that most important thing was price so it's no great surprise that we're getting the tools that our managers want us to have and that they aren't as good as the tools that we choose ourselves one of my favorite examples of this was from a woman that we interviewed who works at home she's a work at home mom and her job was to transcribe interviews with customers and in meetings and whatnot and produce color code reports and she was doing this job for a while eventually her printer broke so she went in and filled out the TPS report or whatever garbage form it is that they needed to fill out to get a new printer and they did eventually send it to her and she opened it up and it was a black-and-white printer which was a bit of a problem because her job was to produce color coded reports so she contacted the the tech department or wherever it was and said okay we'll look you know I appreciate you got me a printer but it's a wrong one I need a color printer and they said well company policy now is that everyone uses black and white printers and she said that's great appreciate it good thanks very much but I have to produce color coded reports so can you please send me a color printer and they sent her the exact same email back saying that company policy was now to only use black and white printers so she had to do is go down to the store buy a bunch of highlighters and hand highlight every single line in all of her reports which as you can imagine did not make her tremendously much more efficient in fact she it enough to make it made her take something like 18 times longer to do every single task that she had to do and eventually of course she quit which is what any of us would do because that's nonsense top-down bureaucracy the kind of large-scale organizational structure that we see in large companies today is built to be inflexible the world is moving very quickly these days as you may have noticed and if you can't change quickly in response to it you get stuff like black and white printers given to people to produce color reports my favorite example of this comes from Brent cork or a professor at the University of Melbourne who did a study that shows that employees with unfettered access to the Internet are actually nine percent more efficient than those that have nanny software you know nanny software is the kind of software that keeps you from going to forbidden websites or using unsanctioned software so it turns out that if your company is spending lots of money to make sure that you're being as efficient as possible they actually make you ten percent less so it's no great surprise that people are breaking the rules right Forrester Research recently discovered that one third of all employees in the United States are using software that they're not supposed to in their jobs this is a huge shock well the good news about all this is that can fix it so bringing this back to my friend with the with a new job he found that the expensing system was really really bad in fact if people had a pack of gum or if he bought a five-course meal for a client he had to fill out the same 60 filled form so you know checkboxes and text fields and drop-down menus and whatnot and after he'd been doing this for a while he found that he was losing like five hours a week which is also some nonsense so after a while he thought well this is this is silly I'm going to fix this problem because he was a technical guy he wrote a script that connected to mint.com I don't know if you guys are familiar with this site basically it lets you put in all your login information for your bank and your credit card and whatnot and it takes all the transactions and downloads them and and cat arises them for you automatically and so because this company didn't have an expense account he had to use his own credit card to do it he had a business card he was very easily to get it was very easy for him to get all of his reimbursable transactions so then he had those auto formatted into the format that the reimbursement system needed he had emailed to him and he made sure it was all right and then he inserted it directly into the finance departments database through a security hole which is unfortunate but but it worked and he'd been doing this for ten some years so he was able to do it safely and he was reviewing every transaction so he was able to make sure that it wasn't the problem and what he found was that over time he was saving about four hours and 55 minutes a week of time that otherwise he'd be doing basically data entry and he was able to do the part of his job that he really liked which was traveling around working on innovation and getting people to collaborate so this is a big win right so the good news is that this is the kind of thing that we can all do these days whether your technical hacker or not that there are loads of tools online I mean you've got Flickr for Images YouTube for video Google Docs for pretty much everything strangely enough this has not been latched on to yet by the corporate executives that are running our companies a recent poll showed that 20% of a bunch of executives which were interviewed admitted that Google Docs was being widely used in their company at the same time 97% of them acknowledged that Microsoft Office was installed on all of the workstations this means that a quarter of all the executives are interviewed in this study we're paying close to $500 a year for every single computer in their organization while they knew full well that everyone was using a free alternative because it was better which again doesn't make a lot of sense the other big game-changer that we're seeing is in the social power that we have now people are on social networks all the time and it gives us an access to a range of people in a range of possibilities that we never had before Facebook the average Facebook user has a 120 friends and is a member of 12 groups LinkedIn study recently showed that the more friends or the more connections you have on LinkedIn the higher the possibility that you're going to have a higher than average income so get started with LinkedIn tonight giving an example of this one of the guys that we interviewed Gary Keeling from Best Buy Gary was a guy in the sales department there and someone had called the committee together to figure out why the corporate policies were being ignored by the guys on the and he said well you know if the problem is that the people on the ground are not able to do what they need to do why don't we set up a wiki and they can tell us about it right and the corporate executive says well yeah no no we're not going to do that so he thought about it and that weekend he decided you know I really believe in this idea so he and another one of his co-workers spent 50 of their own dollars and set up a web page wiki wiki site which eventually became blue shirt nation and blue shirts all the people who actually worked in the stores or blue shirts and in a few months time 3/4 of the entire organization was on this web site and a few months later the company was making a heck of a lot more money because all those employees were making notes like a compendium of common solutions to common customer complaints a list of supply chain issues and how they could be solved so now Best Buy's competitor is actually out of business and Best Buy has a new line of business consulting to other businesses about how to make their own blue shirt nation right this is so that's the good news which is that these employee oriented changes are actually working it turns out that those companies which make a big effort to support their employees and doing what they do best do better than those companies that don't and we see this in a lot of examples so for example Google has a 20% time where all employees are supposed to spend 20% of their time working on whatever they want and such minor projects as Gmail came out of this sort of an effort the good news about all this also is it's not just in the company that we're starting to see this sort of a result there's a website called Kickstarter com which is um it's a site where you can we can go on and suggest a project that they'd like to do and say look this is the minimum amount of money that I need in order to get this thing off the ground and then anyone in the world can go and kick in some cash and if it hits the minimum amount then they get the money and they get to go do the project and everyone's happy this last summer for college students decided that rather than get a summer job they wanted to make an open-source privacy oriented social software package and I thought this is something that's really needed they wanted to give it away for everybody for free and they figured they needed 10,000 dollars to pay their rent and get enough top ramen or cheap food that they could make it through the summer and after a couple months of campaigning they beat their $10,000 mark by a fair bit they actually got two hundred thousand dollars that was donated because people really believed in what they were doing which shows that if you follow your passion increasingly we have some means to actually get it executed so let me bring it back to my to this friend of mine after he developed the solution to the expensing system he figured well hey this is saving me five hours a week that's a significant amount of money to my company what how much money could I save the company if everyone had this so I made an estimation of that and then he thought well how much more competitive with my company be if everyone could travel and collaborate more which again you'll remember was what he was hired for and then he thought well there's going to be some costs so I'll have to do a project plan to make this enterprise ready so there's you know FA cues and documentation and stuff like that so he calculated it up and he realized he could save the company millions and millions of dollars and he package this into a really nice presentation and he asked for the executive team to have a meeting with him and he went and sat down with them and he walked on through the entire thing showed him how much money that he could save them and they fired which brings me to my last point that there that there are consequences but not in the way that you may be thinking when I came and met my friend after he'd gotten fired three days later I'd expected to meet him at the bar buy him several beers pat him on the back and keep him from crying but in fact when I showed up he was smiling ear-to-ear and when I asked him why he said well I'm glad I got out of the company when I did because the company has no future I gave him a golden opportunity on a silver platter a chance to innovate be more competitive and they told me to get out the door that's not the kind of company that I want to be at and I'm glad I left when I did I think this is something that's really critical is that we're all now in a time when people are looking for more from their jobs than a paycheck a recent survey showed that six out of ten employees think that a work-life balance is the most important thing in figuring out where and when they want to work pay being tenth on that list right now most people will have an average of ten jobs in their lifetime and if you're younger in between 20 and 30 you're likely to change jobs every two years as that rate of change if your company is not helping you learn advance your career and do something that means something to you what's going to keep them from walking out the door and when they do walk out the door they'll walk out with everyone they've met and added to their social networks and everything that they've learned so one last example of a very fine embodiment at this point one of the guys that we quote about in the book is a young fellow who just recently got out of school and got a job with a yacht company so his job he'd grown up around a marina and knew a lot about these boats knew how these boats were made and was really excited to be working there but because he had no real-world experience they gave him a kind of a low low grade job and he ended up with a lot of extra time so we did what every twenty something guy does when he's got a computer and an internet connection and some spare time he hopped online started poking around and he found that there was a few news groups for customers people who owned these yachts who weren't very happy about it they were all trying to get customer support but it turned out that this yacht company was not very good at doing that and they insisted that people fill out a bunch of forms and you know sit around on the phone on hold and whatnot so he decided that he would help them alright it seems natural enough so he started suggesting solutions like oh if you've got this problem with your engine seizing up your mom going to try changing the oil or oh you got peeling in this version of the yacht in terms of their cabin well you know you should probably try this you know iron on stuff or whatever it is and you know this is just what he did most of the time during the day because people really liked it and they were really responded to it and pretty soon a lot of people were going into this news groups to get help because who wouldn't want an individual helping you with all your problems so eventually his boss got word of this of the fact that all these customers were being really excited by what was going on and so he called this guy into the office and said this is you know this is very interesting what you're doing have you cleared the that you're doing all this with the sales department and he said no you know and have you cleared everything that you're saying on there with the marketing department and he said well no and so his boss said well you need to stop doing it we're going to fire you which sucks but what you're going to do I mean is he's 20-something guy so he went back to the news groups and he said looking oh sorry everyone can't do this anymore boss says no good luck and goodbye at which point something very interesting happened everyone on the news group who owned these yachts got together they made an LLC they made a small company they elected this kid president then then they went back to the yacht company and said you need to run all of your servicing through this company or we will boycott you and we will have all of our friends boycott you and it turns out there are not so many people that own or buy yachts in the world that this is an insignificant threat so that's exactly what they did and this kid went from working in the mailroom to being CEO of a very profitable company with obviously a pretty good fan base so this is a sort of thing that we can see happen today it's getting more common so in closing I wanted to bring it back just a moment to this friend of mine with the reimbursing system because it turned out that after he'd had a few beers he confessed that he was excited about more than just the fact that he'd managed to leave this company before he'd wasted a lot of time with that one of the other things that he was very pleased about is that three days after he'd gotten fired he had four job offers on the table and I asked him you know you've been fired you're out of work three-three know how to get four job offers in three days and he said well you know as soon as I got fired you know I was in the elevator twittering about it and then on the way back on the bus I was posting on Facebook about it and then when I got home I blogged about it right so all of his peers everyone in his network suddenly knew about what he had done two people had openings in our company and they mediately said look just call in we'll interview you right now you know obviously you're innovative you're you've got incentives you you try really hard to do new things this is a kind of thing that we need and two other people had actually made entirely new jobs up just for him because they thought that while he was doing so good a few points after that he confessed that there was one other little thing that he was kind of pleased about you know the software package that he had written and built up for his company before they fired him he sold it to their leading competitor so which is what we call an epic win so in closing I want to encourage you all to examine the systems that you're involved in now the companies where you work the organizations you're a part of and consider breaking a few rules to make things better chances are good that you'll improve your life your career and possibly your company thanks very much you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 227,847

Rating: 4.8730512 out of 5

Keywords: TEDx, hacking, Science Gallery, TEDxDublin, tedx, ted talks, ted x, Josh Klein, tedx talk, Ireland, ted talk, tedx talks, ted

Id: H07pbDhBgXg

Length: 17min 28sec (1048 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 22 2010