Facebook’s campus in Menlo Park, California, includes a large sign reading The Hacker Company and a giant HACK configured into the surface of one of its many pedestrian plazas. Founder Mark Zuckerberg is fond of extolling the virtues of the Hacker Way, an obsessive-compulsive need to change, fix, and improve systems, rejecting the status quo even in the face of outright resistance or claims that some innovation is impossible to accomplish. The company often sponsors Hackathons in which teams of employees work together to design a new concept in a short spurt of creativity. In fact, the Facebook Timeline service was conceived in a Hackathon.

Given that Facebook itself is the frequent target of malicious hacking, Zuckerberg’s use of the term and glorification of the spirit of hacking is ironic. Why does he extol the Hacker Way? How is it connected to the concept of organizational learning? What does it signal to organizational insiders and outsiders about change and innovation?