Hack Your Bureaucracy

Get Things Done No Matter What Your Role on Any Team

By: Marina Nitze, Nick Sinai

Narrated by: Julian Thomas

In this "deeply empowering and practical book"(Cecilia Muñoz), two technology and innovation leaders reveal dozens of tactics that enabled them to accomplish seemingly impossible reforms in organizations of all types and sizes.

Whether you just started your first entry-level job, run the entire company, or just feel trapped by your condo association bylaws, it’s time to it’s time to learn how to get big things done and make a lasting impact with Hack Your Bureaucracy.

From local government to the White House, Harvard to the world of venture capital, Marina Nitze and Nick Sinai have taken on some of the world’s most challenging bureaucracies—and won. Now, they bring their years of experience to you, teaching you strategies anyone can use to improve your organization through their own stories and those of fellow bureaucracy hackers, including:

• Find Your Paperclip: use small steps to achieve big change
• Set Your North Star: keep your end goal in sight
• Cultivate the Karass: assemble an adept team and network
• Don’t Waste a Crisis: turn every opportunity into a chance for change
• And more!

Change doesn’t happen just because the person in charge declares it should, even if that person is the CEO of your company or the President of the United States. Regardless of your industry, role, or team, Hack Your Bureaucracy shows how to get started, take initiative on your own, and transform your ideas into impact.

©2022 Marina Nitze and Nick Sinai (P)2022 Hachette Go

Critic reviews

“If you’ve ever been frustrated by red tape, think of this book as a pair of scissors. Marina Nitze and Nick Sinai are master bureaucracy busters, and their experience in the White House shows how you can root out inefficiency in your own backyard.”—Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of THINK AGAIN and host of the TED podcast WorkLife

"I’ve never read a book with so many good ideas. Every page that I read, I kicked myself, thinking back on all the times I tried to make change and failed. If Hack Your Bureaucracy had been written 30 years earlier, I would have accomplished so much more in my life."—Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics and University of Chicago professor",

Whether you are revamping your small business, helping to improve the PTA, or leading a scaled organization, this book has something for you. Marina and Nick take solving complex organizational problems and driving outcomes to a new level. Hack Your Bureaucracy is a step-step-guide on how to have impact one practical step at a time. Their bureaucracy hacking advice is thoughtful, tested and useful wisdom for those leading in any sector.”—Tara McGuinness, co-author of Power to the Public, founder, New Practice Lab

Better for Senior and Mid-Level Employees than New Ones

This book is good and offers techniques to get through bureaucratic bogs. However, it’s more geared for people already in positions of authority rather than newer employees.

I loved & hated it. It five brilliant advice about how to get things done within the dysfunctional system known as bureaucracy.

And that what I hate about it. It's a band aid on a bullet wound.

By working within an idiotic system, we're contributing to maintaining that system rather than smashing it to replace it with something that's adaptive & works better.

The template for that better system is Reed Hasting's No Rules Rules.

This book is invaluable for anyone stuck / forced to work within a bureaucracy, but just be aware it's the equivalent to thinking the Earth is flat, an inferior solution to system wide change that will eliminate or at least greatly reduce the need to " hack " anything.

Sadly, unless you're too he founder, CEO, or similar hacking your bureaucracy is probably your only alternative.

Listen to this book to get things done inside stupid maladaptive systems, but quit or smash said system if you want to change the world.

Highly Recommend

This was a great layout of how to approach complex and bureaucratic problems. 100% recommend.

Great Concepts

Great tools to support change in any organization that supports radical change. This book is a most have for your personal library.

Good concept with unnecessary politics

The good made some good points about change and getting stuff accomplished. The overtly political slate was made time after time. This is a distraction from the main topic. It would be interesting to read a follow up on to see if the changes remained positive after a few years.

Thinking outside the Box

This book gives a whole new meaning, to to thinking outside the Box. Well still remaining inside the Box of business. How they make it fun to be A bureaucracy hacker, I will never know. Full of Inspiring Well researched examples of others experiences as bureaucracy hackers. Clever, Resourceful and Informative. A must read to invoke change.

no story just lists of ideas from google

this is just a list of "maybe try...." with a bunch of examples you've thought of or tried before or found on Google rather than any real specific system that gets results.

very disappointing.