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The major thing that springs to mind here is I've never seen a compelling reason to believe that the original CIA suggestions actually worked. In my experience

by roenxi 2y ago

The major thing that springs to mind here is I've never seen a compelling reason to believe that the original CIA suggestions actually worked. In my experience workers like that exist naturally and organisations are great at just sidelining them. I think in that section the CIA was just writing a listicle that sounded good [0]. The way to cripple a company is to get bad people promoted into management and have them optimise something plausible but not profitable. Like what happened in a lot of slow-fail engineering companies - insist on maximising the profit metric to the point where the actual product becomes compromised. That strategy can be intiated from almost anywhere in management too because a constant "what if we optimise for profit" [1] usually does well at meetings. Being a destructive CTO is almost too easy. Just don't do anything much, weed out any competent people in the level below you and develop a culture of pushing blame aaaaalllllllll the way down the org chart, ideally out of the technical part of the tree, so that nothing broken gets fixed. When people catch on, allow blame to move 1 level up the org chart and do a big shakeup to clear out any institutional knowledge that might have built up in spite of you. That game can go on for years. [0] I've seen people where "do things through official channels" and "demand written orders" would have made them more productive. We are our own worst enemies. [1] Yes, the irony here is that naive optimising for profit is typically not profitable.

hobs 2y ago
Oh yeah, this one really is fun. We used to joke that the CTO of one of the companies I worked for made a killing as his second job was for our competitors. Turns out the dude has been doing that for about 15 years between various places and now is about to retire, blameless in the eyes of everyone who doesn't understand what happened.
- andrei_says_ 2y ago
  Doing what? Getting paid by a competitor to destroy his current company?
  - hobs 2y ago
    No, being incompetent to the point where if you squinted he might as well be.
    - walterbell 2y ago
      If those were public companies, one could backtest put option signals timed by his career moves.
jt2190 2y ago
Refer to the section “(11)(b) Managers and Supervisors” https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/SimpleSabotage.pdf https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...
krisoft 2y ago
> I've never seen a compelling reason to believe that the original CIA suggestions actually worked. Let’s set asside the fact that the document wasn’t written by the CIA. The purported goal of this document was to provide practicaly applicable advice to the regular citizen who found themselves under enemy occupation. Most concretely to be given to the French people who did not like the German occupation. You are talking about the strategy “working” or “not working” as if these are binary things. The goal here was not that these simple steps will bring Germany to their knees but to increase the cost of the occupation. To cause enough deniable friction which bogs down the resources and make everything just a bit more inefficient. > In my experience workers like that exist naturally They do. And that is the point. That is what makes these strategies deniable. > and organisations are great at just sidelining them If that is your experience I would love to work where you worked. In my experience when someone is following this strategy sidelining only happens slowly and at great costs. One of the many costs is people comitting avoidable blunders when they dismiss real and well reasoned objections in their haste to cut through a sea of useless ones. > to get bad people promoted into management Sure. But that takes time. You are thinking on a different time scale than the authors of this document were thinking about. The document was published in Jan 1944. The Normandy landings happened in June the same year and by the end of the next year the war was won. You don’t have time to slowly promote bad people into management. If a dude who read your booklet bumbles about a bit and delays the repair of a train line by days that is a win in this context. Nobody expected that Germany is going to collapse on their own just because enough people sabotage meetings and plug up toilets. (That is by the way also a suggestion from the manual 5.1.b.2. Somewhat less often cited than the points applicable to office work.)
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  >>workers like that exist naturally Ones whose only significant effort (if any) is to be a mainstream employee in all other ways since nothing will ever make them productive or capable of efficient operation. >> and organisations are great at just sidelining them >If that is your experience I would love to work where you worked. Me too. That does seem like uncommon good fortune. Too often these are the ones that get promoted into higher levels of mangement, it is so widespread among different companies it goes undetected in the way the CIA intended. Plausibility beats productivity.
oldgradstudent 2y ago
You can do far far worse than naive optimizing for profit. Optimizing for *REPORTED* profit. People learn very quickly to manipulate the reporting, modeling, and accounting. Just less than two decades ago we had the entire financial system lending massive amounts of money to the worst possible borrowers and REPORTING massive profits.
mattacular 2y ago
> [1] Yes, the irony here is that naive optimising for profit is typically not profitable. Yes but only over a relatively long time period, which the overarching system itself is not incentivizing anyone to look at too carefully.
stavros 2y ago
They do work, we had a director who did all that in a previous company (probably unintentionally), and things ground to a halt and productivity fell to zero.
thih9 2y ago
> naive optimising for profit is typically not profitable Naive optimizing for anything, while consuming that metric as fuel, has that effect. A.k.a. “We will continue having meetings until we figure out why productivity is dropping”.

by roenxi 2y ago

hobs 2y ago

Oh yeah, this one really is fun. We used to joke that the CTO of one of the companies I worked for made a killing as his second job was for our competitors. Turns out the dude has been doing that for about 15 years between various places and now is about to retire, blameless in the eyes of everyone who doesn't understand what happened.

andrei_says_ 2y ago
Doing what? Getting paid by a competitor to destroy his current company?
- hobs 2y ago
  No, being incompetent to the point where if you squinted he might as well be.
  - walterbell 2y ago
    If those were public companies, one could backtest put option signals timed by his career moves.

jt2190 2y ago

Refer to the section “(11)(b) Managers and Supervisors” https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/SimpleSabotage.pdf https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...

krisoft 2y ago

> I've never seen a compelling reason to believe that the original CIA suggestions actually worked. Let’s set asside the fact that the document wasn’t written by the CIA. The purported goal of this document was to provide practicaly applicable advice to the regular citizen who found themselves under enemy occupation. Most concretely to be given to the French people who did not like the German occupation. You are talking about the strategy “working” or “not working” as if these are binary things. The goal here was not that these simple steps will bring Germany to their knees but to increase the cost of the occupation. To cause enough deniable friction which bogs down the resources and make everything just a bit more inefficient. > In my experience workers like that exist naturally They do. And that is the point. That is what makes these strategies deniable. > and organisations are great at just sidelining them If that is your experience I would love to work where you worked. In my experience when someone is following this strategy sidelining only happens slowly and at great costs. One of the many costs is people comitting avoidable blunders when they dismiss real and well reasoned objections in their haste to cut through a sea of useless ones. > to get bad people promoted into management Sure. But that takes time. You are thinking on a different time scale than the authors of this document were thinking about. The document was published in Jan 1944. The Normandy landings happened in June the same year and by the end of the next year the war was won. You don’t have time to slowly promote bad people into management. If a dude who read your booklet bumbles about a bit and delays the repair of a train line by days that is a win in this context. Nobody expected that Germany is going to collapse on their own just because enough people sabotage meetings and plug up toilets. (That is by the way also a suggestion from the manual 5.1.b.2. Somewhat less often cited than the points applicable to office work.)

fuzzfactor 2y ago
>>workers like that exist naturally Ones whose only significant effort (if any) is to be a mainstream employee in all other ways since nothing will ever make them productive or capable of efficient operation. >> and organisations are great at just sidelining them >If that is your experience I would love to work where you worked. Me too. That does seem like uncommon good fortune. Too often these are the ones that get promoted into higher levels of mangement, it is so widespread among different companies it goes undetected in the way the CIA intended. Plausibility beats productivity.

oldgradstudent 2y ago

You can do far far worse than naive optimizing for profit. Optimizing for *REPORTED* profit. People learn very quickly to manipulate the reporting, modeling, and accounting. Just less than two decades ago we had the entire financial system lending massive amounts of money to the worst possible borrowers and REPORTING massive profits.

mattacular 2y ago

> [1] Yes, the irony here is that naive optimising for profit is typically not profitable. Yes but only over a relatively long time period, which the overarching system itself is not incentivizing anyone to look at too carefully.

stavros 2y ago

They do work, we had a director who did all that in a previous company (probably unintentionally), and things ground to a halt and productivity fell to zero.

thih9 2y ago

> naive optimising for profit is typically not profitable Naive optimizing for anything, while consuming that metric as fuel, has that effect. A.k.a. “We will continue having meetings until we figure out why productivity is dropping”.