Lydia Schültken sees the key for real change in the development of new, optimized routines, not in extensive change projects. Work Hacks are not given from “above” or conceived by a management consultancy, but are changed, tested and implemented, introduced by those involved and affected.

The author defines four principles on which work hacks are based:

  1. They change workflows and encourage a team to take responsibility, be effective, innovate and collaborate better.
  2. They are not ordered from above. Each team decides for itself how changes are implemented.
  3. They are defined as experiments and introduced after a pilot phase, or reinstated if the team finds them unhelpful.
  4. They are discussed and implemented without board decisions, lengthy analyses or strategy consulting.

In six short stories, Ms. Schültken illustrates how the design and implementation of work hacks works. This makes the book more narrative with a continuous story than a reference book and makes it easy to read.

For the “fast” reader a short description is defined for each of the Work Hacks, the framework is represented, in which Work Hack is helpful, which is to be considered thereby and which aids are possibly necessary.

The Work Hacks shown include:

  • focus time
  • stack time
  • time boxing
  • strength focus
  • retrospective
  • Y-talk

The author understands these topics as suggestions to venture into a new approach.
It is fun to read the book, to try out the suggestions or to derive new topics from them.

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