1944 OSS Manual on How to Sabotage Productivity

Full manual has been removed from the website.

Some favorites 1. Work slowly. 2. Rehash settled items from previous meetings

Here are a few which could modernize the manual:

Force hangup the person speaking when available during critical moments.

Attend meetings late.

Always jump to another call when critical choices are made.

Review all possible options, and reject the best two for "security" reasons.

Let the contractors have free reign.

Hire only the long winded and argumentative.

Fire your testers and embed a few contractors to understudy your best devs.

Always fire the bottom ten percent.

Put your best devs on formatting reports.

Try this for the original CIA page and pdf:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170202154909/https://www.cia.g...

Or the Gutenberg version of the manual:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26184/page-images/26184-imag...

This always makes the rounds because it's funny how well it matches just... an average office environment. Are your coworkers spies?!?!

It seems to me that this war-era document might have been hastily created, and maybe they just asked 100 office workers: "What really grinds your gears". And then put the results in here without further analysis.

What's missing is some shred of evidence that the things it says to increase can be increased. Want more pointless meetings? You can't just do that. Maybe organizations are naturally resilient to more pointless meetings, having naturally reached a saturation point already.

Not reproduced in the Intercept article: undermine the capacity, availability, and reliability of public transportation, especially rail. Someone in the KGB must have gotten a copy ;-).