> 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.)
Feels too hairsplitting. It was the same type of people doing largely the same activities with the same objectives, even if on paper there was a 2-year hiatus between OSS being dissolved and CIA created. People would understand if you wrote "OSS/CIA did X" when describing the 1940s/50s/60s.
Similar to how a branch of the US Public Health Service [0] originally tasked with malaria prevention became Communicable Disease Center (CDC) in 1946-67, subsequently renamed to "Center for Disease Control" and "Centers for Disease Control" (1980), "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention". It hasn't actually been called the "Center for Disease Control" since 1980, although many people (incl. journalists) still call it that.
Also, most countries' Department of Defense/Ministry of Defence were called
Ministry of War or Department of War during WWII (and some only controlled the army, not all branches of military). [1] And the White House War Room was renamed the Situation Room in 1961. (RIP George Carlin.)
Wild Bill Donovan’s admirers and critics still argue over his legacy, but on one point they agree: His World War II Office of Strategic Service (OSS) became the Petri dish for the spies who later ran the CIA as well as the special operators who conduct some of the most daring raids the world has ever seen.
Four CIA directors — Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, William Colby and William Casey — learned the craft of clandestine warfare as operatives for Donovan’s OSS. Indeed, the daring, the risk-taking, the unconventional thinking, and the élan and esprit de corps of the OSS permeated the new agency.
So would the OSS’s failings: the delusions that covert operations, like magic bullets, could produce spectacular results, or that legal or ethical corners could be cut for a higher cause.
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.
> You are talking about the strategy “working” or “not working” as if these are binary things.
WWII was before all this, but we have decades of management experience about how to take ordinary people and make them productive in an industrial setting.
The CIA list isn't the inverse of that. They didn't have Dilbert then either, but it looks like the equivalent of mailing over some Dilbert comics. Maybe it is better than nothing and I don't fault them for trying everything but I've never seen evidence that these are actually effective hints at sabotaging an organisation. The office-work stuff, not the physical ideas which I assume are quite effective.
Now that the discipline exists it'd be interesting to get a group of great operations researchers together and have them come up with their own list of ideas then see what the overlap is. It might be quite small. Is it more damaging to have a great worker who gets one or two key thing wrong or a grumpy guts who does poorly at everything? I suspect the former, the sabotage handbook the latter.
It isn't aimed at one or two individuals, it is aimed at the workforce of an occupied country who are required to keep working and directly/indirectly supporting the occupying power.
This is for the people who, for whatever reason, can't be partisans but can do their part to ensure that they're not collaborating.
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.)