Josh Klein

Technologist; Fervent Hacker of All Things

BIG IDEAS

• Hacking Business: Opportunities of the Networked World
  Crowdsourcing, Creative Commons, social currencies, virtual worlds—all of these and more are means to achieving new, more profitable, more collaborative business models with lower costs, greater reach, and deeper customer involvement than ever before. Drawing from his own experiences in publishing, fashion, research, information security, government, and more, Josh reveals how results can be achieved through dramatic "hacking"—reorganizing, rearranging and disintermediating the components of any business.
• Hacking the Future: Understanding What's Next for Business
  Josh paints a picture of where the world is going—what the trends and technologies of this slighter slope of the singularity curve is aiming at. What will we see in the successful organization of the future? Where is technology going? Josh will give you a snapshot of what the 20-somethings at your front desk are *really* doing. The dissemination of privacy and personality across rapidly devaluating social currencies will change relationships in and out of the office, which is why the virtual world is becoming more important than the real one, at least as far as friends and funds go.
• How Technology Changes the Game: The New Rules Your Mom Already Taught You
  There are a few simple rules to winning in the new economy, and they're bascially the same rules your mom taught you—play nicely with others, share your toys, don't lie. Josh will validate these and other traditional maxims on a grand scale through examples such as Best Buy's Blue Shirt Nation to Exxon Valdez along with specific guidelines for implementing them into your own organization.

SNAPSHOT BIO

"Josh Klein is the quintessential hacker— someone who takes his greatest joy from combining the unexpected and seeing the result work in new and better ways."

Josh has practiced and was trained, both formally and informally, in hacking—social systems, computer networks, institutions, consumer hardware, animal behavior, and, most recently, the publishing industry. When he's not taking things apart or putting them back together again, he speaks, writes, and consults on new and emerging technologies that improve people's lives—and has tremendous fun doing it.

Most of Josh's time is spent speaking to companies and at conferences such as Gadgetoff, TED, SICS, LA-IP, BIF, and Serious Play, and he has appeared on the Sundance Channel, Nova, and other programs. He also spends a significant amount of time consulting to companies large and small, such as Microsoft, Oracle, Frog Design, Nokia, Johns Hopkins, Bankinter, The United States Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and others.

But really what Josh does is this: he examines systems, he takes them apart, and he puts different pieces together to produce something new and more effective. He hacks. Everything.

A Closer Look at Josh

FOCUS AREAS
What's on Josh's current research agenda?

Currently, Josh is focused on four main projects:

1) A Creative Commons Scriptwriting Challenge that lets anyone submit derivative scripts for any platform and vote up the ones they like best. The winners get prize money and access to predefined contracts with major media producers.

2) The SEED/BED Project pairs high-end designers with students in the Sweat Equity Enterprises program to create and tour a carbon-negative Airstream trailer around the US, videoblogging conversations about sustainability with high profile and ordinary people together. On its return, the lessons learned are used to create a pre-fab, fully sustainable small home on a green roof as part of a vertical farming community in NYC.

3) Hacking Work is a book about how the cheats, loopholes, wink-and-a-nudge bending of rules has been part of work since the industrial age and how now, more than ever, it's critical that employees get support in ommitting these "bad acts." They're going to break the rules anyway, and with the rise of Millenials the tools and techniques are more powerful than ever. Join now and your business will grow in leaps and bounds. Or continue to try to keep control and lose it all.

4) The Serendipity Project is an experiment in social structuring paired with semantic metanalysis of online communities to maximize the chance of those real-life serendipitous meetings, when you meet someone you never knew existed, but who knows/is/wants exactly the right thing for your mutual success.

ENGAGEMENTS
How have other organizations utilized Josh's expertise, and what's ahead on his schedule?

Josh will be speaking at Lift, Pinc, and several other industry conferences. He has worked with BBH, Someecards.com, Bloomberg, the Guardian, Make Magazine, and several other startups.

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE
Who shapes Josh's thinking and inspires his work?

Clay Shirky, Spike Bowman, Benjamin Franklin, Zhuang Zi, Paul Holman, Peter Brokep, Aimee Mullins, Cindy Gallop, Joi Ito, Cory Doctorow, and Hulda Emilsdottir.

RECOMMENDED READING
What's on Josh's must-read list?

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants by Robert Sullivan
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen
Art of Computer Programming, Volume 2: Seminumerical Algorithms by Donald Knuth
Draumalandid by Andri Snaer Magnason

MIND FUEL
Which blogs, web sites, and industry events does Josh tap into to feed his mind and fuel his creativity?

Josh visits BoingBoing.net and Slashdot daily, Penny-Arcade.com, Deviantart.com, and PirateBay.org regularly.

Josh also tries to attend at least one conference a month, and to have coffee with folks he's never met and who are outside his field once a week. Beyond that, New York City provides him an endless stream of events so that at least a couple times a week he finds myself at a cocktail party or opening or show or *something* where he's talking to somebody who blows his mind.

OUTREACH
What are Josh's pressing questions, and on which topics does he seek your feedback?

• In what ways are you successfully breaking the rules to achieve superior results?
• What surprised you about your own use of technology today?
• What was the oddest interaction you've had this week?
• Which companies are doing things differently and seeing success follow?
• More importantly, what are you or your company doing the same way they always have, and not getting the results you DO want?