The curse of the badly run meeting
In January 1944 the Office of Strategic Services, an American wartime intelligence agency, issued a short document. The “Simple Sabotage Field Manual” offered advice on how ordinary citizens in occupied Europe could disrupt the German war machine.
To cause physical damage, the guide tells the “citizen-saboteur” to use everyday items like salt, nails, pebbles and candles as weapons. This bit of the guide is a window into historical derring-do: dried-up sponges that can expand to plug sewer systems, jammed locks on unguarded buildings, various references to emery dust.
But the guide also outlines a less direct sort of sabotage, which is alarmingly familiar to anyone who works in an office today. This form of obstruction involves behaviour that confuses, demoralises and delays. Manager-saboteurs should ensure that three people have to approve things when one would do. Employees should spread disturbing rumours. Everyone should “give lengthy and incomprehensible explanations when questioned”. At some point a wartime effort to hurt the Nazis appears to have been mistaken for a serious guide on how to run the modern workplace.
2023-11-13 10:58:24
Source from www.economist.com
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