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.

The picture at the top of this post is from team Helment Hack 2.0 who is working on a sensor and modeling application that they hope will help to detect concussions in athletes based on how they walk following a head injury. While they are prototyping the sensor with a football helmet, they believe the sensor could eventually shrink to the size of a small patch that any athlete could wear with the goal of dramatically reducing the impact a concussion has on a young (or professional) athletes brain.

Admittedly, I have always cringed a bit when I hear companies say they are ‘hacking’ things as the terminology felt forced but seeing thousands of people working at the same time to rapidly develop, test, prototype and present molecule-style features and applications, it does make a bit of sense.

It’s important that you are passionate about what you do for your career and that’s the goal of OneWeek; open the door to creative ideas and to remove the barriers to building an application or feature that you have wanted to make but never had the time or support to do so. Of course there are obvious benefits for Microsoft as well as they get new avenues to explore and IP to promote but it also allows employees to set their own agenda for their career.

Microsoft has built an entire philosophy around the hack mentality that started with the Garage incubator and blossomed into OneWeek. While OneWeek may be the highest profile event that encompasses this mentality on campus, it’s a perpetual process that never ends inside its Garage.

OneWeek is a way to put an idea on to a launch-pad and fire it off into the world to see if it will stick and while many of the projects may never be touched again after this week, there is a high probability that quite a few will live-on and make their way into software.

One of the more high profile hacks that has come to life and is quite literally changing the world for those impacted by ALS  is what Jenny Lay-Flurrie, Director of Accessibility is working on for Steve Gleason. By using off the shelf components and a bit of ‘hacking’, her team was able to build a wheelchair that can be driven by eye movements which has allowed Steve to become more independent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXOWTLrWqzg

Creativity isn’t limited to one week in July either, Microsoft makes resources available all year so that if in October a team wants to ‘hack’ out some new features or products, the Garage has the same level of support and resources to make that possible. And while next week will return life back to normal on campus, the goal of OneWeek is to inspire teams to constantly think outside the box about what they would do if there were no barriers to creativity.

Every large tech company wants to foster internal creativity and Microsoft’s approach is a methodical process of removing the common-barriers entrepreneurs face to expedite the path from idea to reality. If an employee wants to change the world, Microsoft will give them all the tools they need to make it happen; all they need is the ambition to be great.