Sabotage your Org like the CIA

The CIA once wrote “The Simple Sabotage Field Manual” which aimed to sabotage an organization’s productivity.

In 1944, this document gave rebellious citizens instructions on how to weaken their country by sabotaging productivity from the inside.

These are my top 12 of the scaringly contemporary suggestions:

• Make speeches. Talk as frequently as possible and at great length.
• Refer all matters to committees for further study and consideration.
• Make the committees as large as possible.
• Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
• Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
• Refer back to matters decided upon.
• Demand written orders.
• Misunderstand orders. Ask endless questions or engage in long correspondence about such orders.
• Contrive as many interruptions to your work as you can.
• Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skillful worker.
• When training new workers, give incomplete and misleading instructions.
• To lower morale, be pleasant to inefficient workers, give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers, complain unjustly about their work.

The paper was de-classified in 2008 and is making a comeback in presentations. It is very accurate and up to date about behaviors you might see on a daily basis. Some of your colleages are maybe following it step by step on behalf of the CIA.

Want to be a great leader? Do the exact opposite!

You find a more complete list as well as pictures of the document on Corporate Rebels.

Picture credit: kirahoffmann on Pixabay.