Friday, December 11, 2009

Simple Sabotage

A co-worker forwarded to me a copy of the OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual. I have reproduced the section on organizational sabotage. It is hilarious, but frightening how many companies that I have worked for seem to follow such self-destructive advice on purpose!

5 comments:

Xach said...

That's great, thanks for posting it.

Andy Wingo said...

Organizations employ these tactics as well as individuals.

http://books.google.com/books?id=4aScfMumCMoC&lpg=PA242&ots=8L894O_kgY&dq=disciplined%20minds%20pow&pg=PA241#v=onepage&q=&f=false

The whole book is well worth a read IMO; it helped me understand graduate education more than anything else I have seen.

I wrote about it also here:

this is meant to be a blockquote:

"All I want to do now is make some big bucks," a physics graduate student told me as he neared completion of his PhD and was starting to look for a job. He knew this simple statement said a lot about how his goals had changed during graduate school. While he may not have even clearly remembered his original intellectual interests or his original degree of determination that his work be of benefit to society, he did realize that somewhere along the way he had become very flexible in these personal and social goals. Listening to him I could see that he sought "big bucks" not as payment for valuable skills that he would put at his employer's disposal, but as compensation for intellectual interests and social goals abandoned.

cosmichorror said...

Wow, the whole book is great.

You can disrupt showings of enemy propaganda films by releasing a bag of moths in the movie theater.

Unfortunately they provide no advice for collecting a bag of moths.

It would have been fun to sit around and brainstorm for that book.

Dan Villiom Podlaski Christiansen said...

Heh, the original is quite fascinating…

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26184/page-images/26184-images.pdf

Slobodan Blazeski said...

Fascinating I'll print it and hang it on the wall tomorrow.