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Postcard No. 4 from Woodside, California 205

the portfolio as a whole will, with some luck, pay off. In science, such
“portfolio building” is analogous to parallel experimentation (Chamberlin,
1890, 1897)—that is, the entertainment of multiple working hypotheses in
an effort to increase the efficiency of experimentation and find unexpected
or breakthrough results.

HACKING AT MANAGEMENT PROBLEMS

Many important management problems defy easy solutions. Hacking, a
term currently associated with those occupying themselves with writing
computer code, may be useful here as a metaphor for inventive experimen-
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tation. Hacking may be particularly appropriate under circumstances in
which the problem at hand, perhaps due to its rapid changing, is unsuited
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for a centralized, predetermined design (Postrel, 1998) and/or in which the
problem cannot—due to its internal complexity and conflict—be “solved”
but only “worked at” (a distinction put forward by George Shultz in a
conversation). Management innovation is such a problem.
Hacking represents the spirit of continuously and relentlessly chopping
at a thorny yet meaningful or worthwhile problem, often through parallel
and multiple efforts without the sense that such an effort one day will be
finished. In other words, hacking is the antithesis of a typical preplanned
“change management” program that begins (“unfreezes”), takes the prede-
termined actions, and enforces the new status quo (“refreezes”). Hacking
also represents the spirit of “working at” management innovation—an
effort likely to require tenacity and patience. Hacking brings the spirit of
individual ownership of problems being worked at—hackers tend to
address issues of meaning to themselves, typically to improve the features
or efficiency of a software program that they consider important for their
own use (Von Krogh, 2003).

PRACTICING INVENTIVE EXPERIMENTATION

Beyond hacking as a metaphor for the incremental, sustained approach of
working at worthwhile problems, inventive experimentation is here defined
as a commitment to the creation and prototyping of seemingly novel