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.
It’s not fom Sir Humphrey, is it?
Certainly seems plausible, and matches the look and feel of the other OSS and Camp X-Ray documentation I have seen.
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!