Culture hacking: Jim McCarthy at TEDxHarambee

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)

TEDxHarambee - STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Music). Milwaukee's first TEDx event. May 9th 2013 in Harambee — a neighborhood with a rich and diverse history and a thriving arts and cultural center in Milwaukee.

Culture Hacking: The Prospect of Magnificence

Abstract: A culture is the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that both describes and shapes a group. Our era is increasingly characterized by an emergent "software culture." Not only is software itself creating much of our global wealth, but the unique challenges of creating our software have demanded wholly new types of engineered corporate culture from us. Various high tech development disciplines have been articulated and "packaged up." In response to the demands of software, we have created several seminal management "movements" (such as Agile, Scrum, XP, etc.). These movements represent the birth of culture engineering. Culture hacking is a distinct kind of culture engineering. Culture hacks express a particular hacker ethos, an ethos originating in the world of software hacking. Good culture hacking will tend to promote freedom, extend openness, and embody rationality and design elegance. As our culture becomes increasingly and fruitfully hacked, we will grow in effectiveness and ambition and will bring more and more problems into scope. This will likely trigger an unprecedented Golden Era, an age of unparalleled magnificence.
While leading projects at Bell Laboratories, The Whitewater Group, and Microsoft, Jim McCarthy saw there was a better way to build products by focusing on the team. He led the creation one of the great Microsoft teams, the Visual C++ team. Much of Microsoft benefited from his ideas as articulated in the seminal book, Dynamics of Software Development from Microsoft Press (1995, 2006). His approach and observations formed the basis of Microsoft Solutions Framework and were a catalyst for and a progenitor of the Extreme and Agile programming movements.

Jim partners with his wife, Michele McCarthy, to run McCarthy Technologies, Inc., which provides technology, training and consulting that enables organizations and teams to consistently generate the greatest possible results. The key to these results is an innovative, proprietary technology called "The Core." It encapsulates and makes accessible the best interpersonal collaboration technology currently available and has been thoroughly researched, tested, and applied over the past 15 years. Just as Jim's earlier approaches contributed to Microsoft's successful culture, and ultimately helped give rise to the XP and Agile movements, his current research into The Core is poised to help a new generation of organizations achieve their highest potential.