University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
Hack Your Bureaucracy
Book

Hack Your Bureaucracy

Get Things Done No Matter What Your Role on Any Team

Marina Nitze and Nick Sinai
Hachette Book Group USA, 2022
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Editorial Rating

8

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  • Insider's Take

Recommendation

How many times have you seen a manager start a new role full of vigor only to run directly into the immovable wall of bureaucracy? Have you gotten frustrated with tedious paperwork that hinders innovation? Hasn't everybody? Now, Marina Nitze and Nick Sinai offer a basic manual on how to navigate bureaucracy successfully. They maintain that if you learn to work with the system, you can hack it to your advantage. From making the most of loopholes to forging valuable alliances, the authors guide you around and through the red tape to drive real change – one innovation at a time.

Summary

Get outside the office to identify its real problems.

Many organizations – companies, non-profits, government agencies and other institutions – have trouble implementing real change at a reasonable rate due to the bureaucratic paperwork that real change requires. However, you can hack the system and find a path through the red tape.

To create change, you need clarity about the problem you want to solve. Most for-profit organizations have the capacity to research and identify customers’ problems. But the people who manage such institutions as schools or government agencies often can’t spend a lot of time or money considering end-users’ experience. 

If you don’t have the resources for extensive investigation, forget the corporate handbook, get out of the office and start talking to real customers. 

Start with your organization’s public engagement unit, and learn about the research its staff has conducted and the knowledge it has compiled about your clients. Then, get out into the field. For example, if you want to change a police department’s tech budget, take a ride with on-duty officers so...

About the Authors

Marina Nitze is a partner at Layer Aleph, and Nick Sinai is a senior advisor at Insight Partners.

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