Sitting comfortably? Take a look at this excerpt from what appears to be a manual written maybe sixty years ago:
Do you identify with any of it? Recognise those behaviours from anywhere?
Stay seated. Now take a look at the cover page of the manual in question:
Yup. Simple sabotage, as practised and trained for by the OSS. Yes, folks, many large enterprises have been OSSified. Of course it’s not happening in your organisation, or in mine. Of course you don’t recognise any of those behaviours. Of course the shoe’s on the other foot.
And of course that shoe’s made of wood.
My thanks to Sean for pointing this out, for transporting me to Euan’s post before I’d got to it in my feed reader. [And thanks as well to Michael Walsh for sending the link to Euan in the first place.]
I’ve taken a long hard look at the manual in question. Looks genuine. Take a look for yourself, Euan links to it. If it does turn out to be a forgery, in these days of Photoshop, at least it’s a good one.
6 responses so far ↓
1 crc // Jul 18, 2008 at 8:01 am
It’s not fom Sir Humphrey, is it?
2 James Marwood // Jul 18, 2008 at 10:50 am
Certainly seems plausible, and matches the look and feel of the other OSS and Camp X-Ray documentation I have seen.
3 When my fox stands next to your hedgehog « Lost ConsCIOusness // Jul 19, 2008 at 6:44 am
[...] July 19, 2008 in Uncategorized I was musing again on the joys of project management yesterday and was talking about project reports. Does anyone actually read project reports? Aside from when you are at a project board meeting and want to “contribute”? [...]
4 Michael Walsh // Jul 23, 2008 at 12:15 am
JP,
Here is the top level link for the Digital Library’s page for the original PDF report.
The library is part of the Fort Leavenworth Command and General Staff College’s Combined Arms Research Library.
Their webpages are all over the place mixing “.mil” with “.com” domains on various sub-topics - but I think it’s genuine.
Institutionalised sabotage as a measure of management efficiency - the irony!
5 Communixx » Blog Archive » Entrprise 2.0 Forum - Teil 2 // Sep 18, 2008 at 10:19 am
[...] Er hat ein sehr schönes Dokument aus den 1930ern gezeigt, in dem beschrieben war, wie man als Mitarbeiter eines Unternehmens das Unternehmen sabotieren kann (als Anleitung für Spione/Saboteure) - und darauf hingewiesen, dass vielen der Vorschläge aus diesem Dokument heute in Unternehmen an der Tagesordnung/”Best Practices” sind - und dass die neue Einstellung (Web 2.0) helfen kann und wird das zu ändern - hier das Dokument in seinem Blog [...]
6 frogpond » Live blogging the Enterprise 2.0 forum - part 1 // Sep 18, 2008 at 10:41 am
[...] organizational pathologies, JP showed a spy manual on how to interfere and disturb - and even when the audience was giggling we all know that these are timeless issues in [...]
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