I hate the trendy “blah blah blah hacker.com” sites (lifehacker.com, this means you, punk). They co-opted the term “hacker” and stripped it of its edge… It’s like picking up a shot glass expecting whiskey and swallowing sweet-tea instead.

Screw the “skilled programmer” neo-definition. A hacker was and is a skilled technician who gains knowledge or solves problems (or both) in an exploratory, often unorthodox, often unauthorized manner. “Unauthorized” means what it means to whomever happens to be defining it—keep that in mind when considering the moral and legal depreciation heaped on hackers and hacking.

Given all that, why, then title a post “Biz Hacking”?

Alph Bingham

Every so often, it’s good to exercise your mind—to step beyond the what-the-fuck-do-I-need-to-do-this-next-thing approach to picking up learning and to actually work out. My life, right now, is about 99% reactionary learning. Alph’s been helping me get my fiber.

The latest challenge is an article titled “Ambiguous Assets for Uncertain Environments: Heterarchy in Postsocialist Firms” by David Stark. There’s more meat in this article than there is grazing on 10 acres of Texas ranch land so I’m only about half-way though, but it has already had an effect on how I see movements like coworking fit into the framework of firms (which are also changing).

It specifically makes one point crystal clear. When the landscape is changing rapidly, it’s healthy to have many different solutions in play. Think about genetic diversity in a population. A genetically diverse population is more capable of withstanding adversity because it’s more likely to have the genes necessary to deal with the adversity somewhere in the gene pool of the population.

So it is with business in our changing world.

Austin

I’m very interested in what’s happening in Austin right now.

I don’t have strong empirical data to back this up, but my feeling is that they’re experimenting with business models as much as they are experimenting with new products and services. The question “what is a business” is open for discussion, and as a result we have things like Conjunctured and the Bootstrap Network and Enterprise Teaming. They are creating genetic diversity.

Of course, I’m sure there’s some of this going on elsewhere. But while speaking to John Metcalf about this several months ago, John suggested that Austin may be unique. The fact that Austin has been kind of left to itself, that it sits on the edge of the radar screen, resulted in a strong desire to figure things out for themselves rather than adopt patterns from the other, more well known, tech hubs.

They’re biz hacking Texas-style

I’ve decided that I like the term “biz hacking”. The business world needs a little subversive, unauthorized, unorthodox learning to shake up the genetic monoculture.

I also owe Alph for the “hacker culture” reference that started this whole thought process…

- Bandit