The OSS Sabotage Manual Became Corporate Best Practice

Summary

This re-publication comes from a deeply uncomfortable recognition. Open to Section 11 and you'll find instructions that could have been lifted from yesterday's management consultant: "Refer all matters to committees." "Haggle over precise wordings of communications." "Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done." The saboteurs' playbook has become our best practices.We puzzle over our economic stagnation, wondering why the technological revolution hasn't made our organizations faster. Since the 1970s, productivity growth has limped along at roughly half its post-war pace, except for a brief internet-fueled surge in the 1990s. The answer stares at us from these pages.About This PublicationThe original Simple Sabotage Field Manual was declassified by the CIA and is in the public domain. What you're reading here is our foreword to the republished manual, exploring its unexpected relevance to modern organizational challenges. The historical document serves as a lens through which to examine how bureaucratic dysfunction has become embedded in contemporary business practices.Leo Tolstoy opened Anna Kareninawith this observation: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." But what may have been true for the Kareninas and the Vronskys is reversed for companies. All unhappy companies are alike: they run on committees, they worship process, they strangle themselves with approvals. They're unhappy in exactly the same way, following exactly the same script. The saboteurs of 1944 are mostly gone. But their manual lives on in every corporate handbook, every best practice guide, every management consulting deck. We are their greatest success.Origins and IntentThe Simple Sabotage Field Manual was initially published in 1944 by the Office of Strategic Services. Although details remain sparse about the document's origins, we know that the Simple Sabotage Field Manual was part of a broader collection of OSS field manuals designed to...