Simple sabotage startup manual

The OSS (now the CIA) once released a guide called Simple Sabotage Field Manual on how to sabotage an organization. That historical document was originally published in 1944, for use by OSS agents in motivating potential foreign saboteurs. The booklet contains instructions for destabilizing progress and productivity by non-violent means. Moreover, is separated into headings that correspond to specific audiences, including: “Organizations and Conferences”, “Managers and Supervisors” and “Employees”.

In this post, I want to extrapolate that manual to the startup environment. You should use this as a tool to detect red flags in your organization and a way to understand how to avoid getting there.

Think about this booklet as the anti-agile startup manifesto.

Organizations and Conferences

  1. Insist on doing everything through “channels”. Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to, expedite decisions.
  2. Make “speeches”. Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate “patriotic” comments.
  3. When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration”. Attempt to make the committees as large as possible - never less than five.
  4. Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
  5. Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
  6. Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to reopen the question of the advisability of that decision.
  7. Advocate “caution”. Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
  8. Be worried about the propriety of any decision. Raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.

Managers and Supervisors

  1. Demand written orders.
  2. “Misunderstand” orders. Ask endless questions or engage in long correspondence about such orders.
  3. Do everything possible to delay the delivery of orders. Even though parts of an order may be ready beforehand, don’t deliver it until it is completely ready.
  4. Don’t order new working materials until your current stocks have been virtually exhausted so that the slightest delay in filling your order will mean a shutdown.
  5. Order high-quality materials which are hard to get. If you don’t get them argue about it. Warn that inferior materials will mean inferior work.
  6. In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that the important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers of poor machines.
  7. Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw. Approve other defective parts whose flaws are not visible to the naked eye.
  8. Make mistakes in routing so that parts and materials will be sent to the wrong place in the plant.
  9. When training new workers, give incomplete or misleading instructions.
  10. To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.
  11. Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
  12. Multiply paperwork in plausible ways.
  13. Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, paychecks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do.
  14. Apply all regulations to the last letter.

Employees

  1. Work slowly. Think out ways to increase the number of movements necessary on your job.
  2. Contrive as many interruptions to your work as you can.
  3. Even if you understand the language pretend to not to understand instructions in a foreign tongue.
  4. Pretend that instructions are hard to understand, and ask to have them repeated more than once. Or pretend that you are particularly anxious to do your work, and pester the foreman with unnecessary questions.
  5. Do your work poorly and blame it on bad tools, machinery, or equipment. Complain that these things are preventing you from doing your job right.
  6. Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skillful worker.
  7. Snarl up administration in every possible way. Fill out forms illegible so that they will have to be done over; make mistakes or omit requested information in forms.
  8. If possible, join or help organize a group for presenting employee problems to the management.
  9. Misroute materials.
  10. Mix good parts with unusable scrap and rejected parts.