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Hacking
university research by the U.S. National Institutes
of Health has risen steadily, yet the number of evolved into a major impediment. Inven-
new drugs* developed trends downward. tive faculty members are hostage to their
SOURCE: NIH; FDA
TLO, regardless of its efficiency or contacts.
7 Work
# of approvals US$ (Billions) Moreover, because many TLOs are short-
60
staffed, professors must queue up to get
30
New
proper attention for their inventions.
approvals NIH Budget The Breakthrough Idea So why not
40 free up the market in technology licens-
20 ing? Let’s allow any inventor-professor to
choose his or her licensing agent—univer-
Learn to love the
20
10 sity-affiliated or not—just as anyone in busi- rule breakers
ness can now choose his or her own lawyer.
W
This would be as simple as having the
1993
1998
2003
2008
tion not be repeated in clean tech. all while valuable ideas languish on univer- Richard Saunders (not his real name) is
Perhaps it was not a bad idea at first for sity shelves. a benevolent hacker. He works for one of
universities to centralize their commer- those banks that did its job so well in 2008
cialization capabilities and give TLOs con- Robert Litan is the vice president for that we landed in the worst financial hole
research and policy, and Lesa Mitchell is the
trol of the process; they gained immediate vice president for advancing innovation, at the we’ve seen since the Great Depression. As
organizational benefits and economies of Kauffman Foundation. the crisis unfolded, the bank’s senior ex-
8
Risk management
ecutives cried out, “Reports! Our kingdom The Promise This kind of workaround Sendhil Mullainathan
Spotting
for more reports!” The problem was that isn’t new—your company has been hacked
what they really wanted—useful, insightful from the inside for ages. What is new is
analysis—couldn’t easily be produced with that the cheat codes are becoming public,
the software provided by corporate IT. and there’s nothing you can do about that.
Bubbles
Poor Richard. What to do? Work 29 Bloggers are telling your employees how
hours a day, 10 days a week, to manually to bypass procedures. Forums give tutori-
create those reports and the much-needed als on how to hack your software security.
on the
analysis? No way. He hacked the system. Entrepreneurs are building apps to help
He softened up a vendor, got a password , your employees run their own tools and
tapped into the database, and began creat- processes instead of yours.
ing never-before-possible reports for the The only successful strategy for a hacked
Rise the
C-suite. world: If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
Would the bank’s auditors and IT secu-
rity guys freak out if they knew that Rich-
Change the debate within your company
to leverage what your hackers know. We’re We have
ard had hacked their system? Uh, yes. But
since then, Richard has become incredibly
seeing managers in enormous corporations
like Google, Nokia, and Best Buy embrace
tools
productive and is now a go-to guy compa- what benevolent hackers would pursue to sound the
nywide. He’s a hero to all those senior execs
who wanted more than data dumps. If only
with or without them: greater worker con-
trol over tools and procedures, increased alarm early
they knew the full story. Says Richard, “As transparency, and meritocracy. As even se-
W
a result of this hack, I keep senior manage- nior management begins to feel the pain of
ment off our backs, so we’re able to con- outdated tools and structures that refuse to The Problem
tinue doing more for our clients with less.” budge, what was once shunned as bad is ill Rogers had sage ad-
He’s not alone in believing that he has to now the new good. vice on investing: “Buy
take matters into his own hands to get the some good stock and
job done and achieve better results for the hold it till it goes up,
Bill Jensen is the president and CEO of the
organization. Many in the workforce are Jensen Group, a change-consulting firm in then sell it. If it don’t go
coming to the same conclusion. The illu- Morristown, New Jersey. Josh Klein is a hacker up, don’t buy it.” The guidance we get today
sion of corporate control is being shattered and a consultant on security and workplace regarding economic bubbles is just about
effectiveness. This article is adapted from their
in the name of increased personal produc- forthcoming book, Hacking Work: Saving Business as helpful: If it bursts, it was a bubble. That
tivity. from Itself, One Bad Act at a Time (Portfolio). kind of postmortem analysis is useful to
historians, but it does nothing to limit the
collateral damage caused by, for example, a
sudden collapse in housing prices.
An early warning system would be more
valuable. For one thing, it would change
the way that regulators go about securing
the safety and soundness of financial insti-
tutions. To ensure that a financial institu-
tion is sound, regulators must discount the
value of its assets for their riskiness. Under
the current Basel regulatory framework,
the discount is determined by looking at
market pricing of risk. This has disastrous
illustration: Lasse skarbovik