Hack Your Bureaucracy: Get Things Done No Matter What Your Role on Any Team

ISBN: 0306827751

Author: Marina Nitze

Two technology and innovation leaders reveal dozens of tactics that enabled them to accomplish seemingly impossible reforms in organizations of all types and sizes. Hack Your Bureaucracy will show you how to get big things done and make a lasting impact, whether you just started your first entry-level job, run the entire company, or just feel trapped by your condo association bylaws. With broad experience in the public and private sectors--including the White House, Harvard, venture capital, and local government--authors Marina Nitze and Nick Sinai have made real reforms in some of the world's most challenging bureaucracies. In this highly entertaining guide to getting stuff done, Nitze and Sinai tell their stories and those of fellow bureaucracy hackers, as they teach strategies that anyone can use--including how to make "paperclip" trades, recruit unofficial "doers", give credit liberally, stab colleagues in the chest, and use the bureaucracy against itself. Making change in organizations is hard. It requires knowing where to focus, figuring out how decisions really get made, and getting buy-in. But you also need to demonstrate tangible results, build authentic allies, and make your progress stick. This book will show you how. Change doesn't happen just because the person in charge declares it should, even if that person is the CEO of your company or the President of the United States. Nitze and Sinai show the best bureaucracy hackers are not insubordinate; instead, they employ "healthy irreverence." The instigator of massive change is often actually an employee who takes initiative on their own. Regardless of your industry, role, or team, Hack Your Bureaucracy shows how to get started and transform your ideas into impact.