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Hack Days
Hack Days
The 20% Doctrine How Tinkering, Goofing Off, and Breaking the Rules at Work Drive
Success in Business by Ryan Tate introduces the concept of "hack days" popularized by
software development teams within companies such as Google and Yahoo! During hack days,
also called 20% time at Google, people are allowed to work on their own projects or on cross-
functional projects, throwing off the constraints of their functional silo. This allows their
creativity to wander into peripheral areas or to work in a flow on a project with other coders
work for different managers.
Hacking, 20% time and kaizen events strike me as instances of creative problem solving.
Some similarities noted in the book:
People in all types of organizations need some of hack days or 20% time to be able to reflect
upon and redesign their processes. People often have a keen awareness of problems and ideas
for countermeasures to these problems, but are held back by formal structures functional silos
that do not enable rapid change and experimentation. There is so much opportunity to
improve that the 20% time will come back as saved time. In some cases these improvements
could be more than problem solving but innovative new services that delight customers and
drive revenue growth.
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