HBR's 10 Breakthrough Ideas for 2010: People Management

#7. People Management: Hacking Work: Learn to love the rule breakers (by Jensen and Klein). Like the world around us, business changes at the speed of light. New technical tools replace old ones at a speed that's breathtaking, if not daunting. Thus, many business systems cannot keep up with the demand. So, those in search of something better, more adaptive often break the rules and both figuratively and literally hack (construct work-arounds) their own business processes to meet the demands of their operations.

The Breakthrough Idea: Learn to become a kind of good hacker—a work-around leader—who doesn’t always play by the rules. As an example, when a system doesn’t work, hack it to get the information needed to get the job done. Such an approach may cause heart burn, but that’s better than the heart attack of a failed company.