Inside The Tent: Microsoft’s Cultural Shift To a Hack Friendly World

At many companies around the world, management creates an agenda and the corporate machine brings the path set in front of them to life. But what happens if you turn that idea on its head and let the employees define the path for the future of the company? What happens when you allow thousands of employees take a break from the daily routine to explore projects that they are passionate about and when backed by the company with not only giving them time to do this but also the resources to bring projects to life, you have what Microsoft calls OneWeek.

When Satya Nadella became CEO, he did away with the annual all-employee meeting and replaced it with OneWeek, a company-wide event that is taking place this week at the company's campuses all around the globe. I was invited to Microsoft's headquarters to poke around the festivities to see what goes on inside the hackathon tents and to better understand how these events lead to new products for the company.

This year, more than 15,000 Microsoft employees (and interns) are participating in the hackathon that covers everything from new functionality for Hololens to voice translation improvements and how to enhance the detection of concussions in football players. And this isn’t happening in some small venue in an empty office on the outskirts of campus; the company constructed massive tents with all the food you could imagine, power, connectivity, and most importantly, support.

At OneWeek, Microsoft employees are working on 3,500 projects that span across 74 countries and 138 cities. To keep these ‘hackers’ full of energy, the company is serving up 5,000 doughnuts, 6,000 lbs. of beef, 10,000 lbs. of chicken, 1,000 lbs of baby carrots, 4,000 lbs. of watermelon and of course, 66 kegs of beer. The company also had lots of water, energy drinks, and other food/snacks available during the event too.

There are two main tents on campus, one is called Hacknado and the other one is called Codapalooza. Goofy names aside, these are large structures and security is very tight and for good reason; what goes on inside these tents is a nebulous for new product creation. The formation of new company IP is being forged inside of these tents and because Microsoft hasn’t had the ability to protect its new products from being copied, the company is extremely careful about who and what equipment is allowed inside the buildings.

That being said, Microsoft did let me wander (and by wander I mean closely escorted) inside the Hacknado tent to get a feel for how the company’s hackathon is birthing new products and features for not only Microsoft products but for entire industries.

One project, named Volunteer Your Voice, is in the process of using volunteered voice samples to help make Skype Translator more accurate while another team is ‘hacking’ bots to help patients with dementia remember to eat or drink water on a regimented basis via notifications on the Microsoft Band.

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