(1) Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions
(5) 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.
I guess Dilbert might be working with the CIA after all.
Stuff has unintended weird incentives, and that can quickly lead to destructive working practices.
One quick example: Factory workers have to clock in. You want people to be on time (8.00 am), so you say that if they clock in after 08:04 they lose 15 minutes wage.
But what (obviously happens) is the people who arrive at 08:04 don't start work until 08:15 (which is, after all, when they're getting paid from). But the people coming in on time mill around a bit before they start work - they clock in at 07:55 and get to the bench at 08:01; or the clock in at 08:00 and get to the bench at 08:03. So there's a bunch of people milling around, not starting work and distracting other workers and etc etc, just because someone invented a broken disincentive late arrivals instead of just being a better manager and telling people to get to work.
I have countless examples of inadvertent and deliberate sabotage in factory work. (One more quick example. A guy turns up for interview. He has a friend with him. The friend waits in reception, falls asleep; he's really scruffy. The interviewee smells of alcohol. His hobby on his CV is "Enjoying Homebrew". Employing that one semi-functional alcoholic destroyed hundreds of person-hours of work, because people were less restrained when they went to the pub at lunch time. (Also, some other alcoholics stopped being sober.))
I should start a blog, I guess.
Or even better: realize that work getting done is what counts, not the exact time your butt hits your seat.
> Employing that one semi-functional alcoholic destroyed hundreds of person-hours of work, because people were less restrained when they went to the pub at lunch time.
What are you saying here? That hundreds of man hours were destroyed because people became a little more laid back? Do you have any evidence to back up that this is really what happened?
Or do you mean people came in totally trashed and actually destroyed equipment? If that's the case I'd blame the manager(s) for letting that happen more than once.
1) Late return to work
2) Tipsy / drunk workers taking longer to get stuff done
3) tipsy / drunk workers doing stuff worse, thus needed it to be reworked
4) tipsy / drunk workers not inspecting properly leading to increased returns from customers
5) the occasional broken / lost item (with JIT this can be a considerable delay if it's the right item)
6) occasional broken tools
7) sober workers resentful at drunk workers and at bad management not doing anything about it.
etc etc.
Yep, a lot of this is down to management, but the UK has a poor reputation for the quality of middle management in industry.
In factory work, being on time matters. Because you're taking a widget from the person to your left, adding value by performing some operation on it, and passing it to the person on your right. If you're not there, and there isn't someone who can fill-in, then the assembly line stops and the firm ships no widgets.
Be late often enough, and you get fired.
I'm very glad that software development work isn't like that, btw. I am not cut-out for Taylorism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Principles_of_Scientific_Ma...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem
"Consider a dental patient (the principal) wondering whether his dentist (the agent) is recommending expensive treatment because it is truly necessary for the patient's dental health, or because it will generate income for the dentist. The two parties have different interests and asymmetric information (the agent having more information), such that the principal cannot directly ensure that the agents are always acting in its (the principals') best interests."
http://www.amazon.com/Dogberts-Top-Secret-Management-Handboo...
[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Practice-Gamesmanship-Winning-Actual...
//edit// Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamesmanship
As for why they were prevalent? CYA. Surely you are not going to fire a manager who insist on inclusivity and following security protocols?
Rational capitalists know this as the business cycle and that once an organization begins to die the point is not to restore it but to extract as much value from it before it dies. The clueless are essential to this process as they are key to helping the sociopaths extract value from the losers.
Ribbonfarm does an excellent job of outlining organizational life cycles in the Gervais principle series.
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...
[edit] I'm referring only to chapter 5, section 11 "General interference with organizations and production."
For example, if a developer at your organization complains they're held up because their PC has 1 gigabyte of RAM instead of 8, that might be 5.11.c.5 sabotage ('do poor work and blame your tools') or it might be because they legitimately need more RAM to run hefty modern IDEs.
Needless to say, treating requests for better equipment as sabotage when they're legitimate probably isn't going to help your organization. The same could probably be said for most of the activities listed in that section.
Did the term "United Nations" have a different meaning during WWII? Was it a common term that latter was given to the official organization we know today?
From this perspective one could potentially read this document as being a product of sabotage.
Related topics (within the national security space): polygraph testing at US laboratories, overheads of Special Access Programs
(2) Forget to provide paper in toiletsTimeless sabotage-by-committee advise. Comments mention Arab Spring, etc. Am I the only one who noticed this?
It is so difficult to build things, but so easy to destroy them.
OMG... our company is under siege!