Sure, but at every level of the hierarchy, there is a boss to break the sabotage induced deadlock, and anyone acting up too much can always be fired/demoted by that same boss.

In looser structures like social movements or nascent labor organizations, it's hard for any individual/subset to wield enough authority to do either of those things.

There are parallels with any organization (even families), but I think it's rather weak when applied to modern corporations.

> Sure, but at every level of the hierarchy, there is a boss to break the sabotage induced deadlock, and anyone acting up too much can always be fired/demoted by that same boss.

This is why the sabotage relies on organizational politics and by the book pedantry.

You have a corporate policy that was created by lawyers and HR for the solitary purpose of ass covering. It's so that if anyone violates it, they can point to the policy as an excuse to scapegoat them or have an independent pretext to punish wrongthinkers for things they're not legally or politically allowed to punish them for.

If you insist on actually following that policy to the letter to the detriment of the organization, your boss is risking their own ass to put a stop to it, so most of them won't. And the policy itself comes from over their head, so they can't change it.

Who are the saboteurs in this analogy? Who are the people who are consciously (but secretly) trying to sabotage the organization/operations?

"Saboteurs" is tongue in cheek. There might be some actual saboteurs in the world, but most people are doing these things out of incompetence or neuroses or personal advantage.

Bob hates to work with X, but Bob's boss's boss got a kickback for signing a contract with X vendor, so now Bob is going to follow every policy to the letter on the X project until it fails or his request for reassignment goes through.

Carol has OCD. You give her a policy book and she's going to read it cover to cover and create her own index to it and make citations to individual provisions whenever she sees anyone violating it, even if they're only violating the letter and not the spirit.

Alice does the same thing but it's because she's an opportunist, so she only looks for policy violations as retaliation for not getting her way and people learn not to cross her.

OK, my understanding is to take your comparison as more of an Office Space style critique of the modern corporation then.

> to take your comparison as more of an Office Space style critique of the modern corporation then.

... Scarily accurate? Spot on? A sad but correct reading of how companies actually operate?

Yes, all of that, but also relatively trivial in comparison to the use of these tactics in operations like COINTELPRO. Almost everyone on HN works in an office (myself included), but I think it's a bit shallow and limiting (and ultimately dangerous) if the primary way we interact with such materials is to strip them of their actual context, and immediately apply them to our mundane individual experience, thinking things like, "yeah that's just like I told my boss, I was like, 'uhhh, this meeting could have been an email?... ;)'". (That's a caricature of their opinion, but it was funny to me, and still expresses what I mean about its relative shallowness).

In my experience (having worked as a peon then a manager, then a senior manager) at one of the companies talked about here in the past?

These techniques aren’t effective because they’re clearly sabotage. They’re effective because they kill an organizations effectiveness AND often happen naturally, so by turning it up a notch you’ll throw even more wrenches into the works than normal - but fly under the radar.

The whole strict hierarchy and breaking ties thing you’re talking about exists because all the things in this manual happen all the time ANYWAY, just not as often.

And there are a number of ways to point fingers and hide/diffuse blame that happen all day everywhere anyway too, and work.

In the specific case of the document, "citizen saboteurs" who were opposed to the Nazi regime, but who weren't in a position to, or didn't want to, take more active measures.

How do companies like Tesla, SpaceX and Jobs era Apple perform so well then? These companies are thousands of employees, multiple departments. Everything I have heard seems to indicate that amazing execution ability of these places. Either Elon knows everything that is going on top to bottom or he must be instilling some fear in managers that keeps them in line. I think its the latter. I hear if your name crosses his desk that means you screwed up/underperformed and that you will have severe punishment. I think this method is not performed as seriously in other organizations and it leads to middle management jockeying for power instead and slowly introducing bloat.

When Apple was designing the original iPhone, they had about 10% as many employees as they do now. And this cruft accumulates over time and with size; there is less of it in smaller and younger organizations.

Managers are also aware of their company's market position. If the new Camaro didn't sell, GM was still going to exist. If the Model 3 didn't sell, Tesla was toast. A middle manager who bankrupts the company inherently loses their job, so people are less inclined to play stupid games when that's what's on the line.

Companies doing novel things are also able to retain employees who believe in the mission even when the big boss is a fire breathing dragon. You put the same kind of boss in charge of the DMV or the cable company and people are just going to quit, or exert political pressure against the boss.

This points to antitrust as a solution. Constrain mergers and vertical integration. Then companies that become bureaucratically inefficient actually fail and go away, solving the problem. And that possibility was always the primary deterrent to it happening, which is why it happens so much more when that isn't on the table.

There may be things government bureaucracies can learn from industry. It’s a different problem domain though. Government institutions are large. Like DoD is 2.68 million employees and that’s only one branch of the federal executive branch. You’ve still got the judicial, legislative branches and all the hierarchies down to the municipal level. Then there’s the fact that many things a single person might try to do have laws around them. Also the leadership changes every 4 or 8 years and when that happens there usually a drastic idealogical shift in the direction to take the organization.

Apple has 150k employees and runs mostly like a dictatorship with very long ruler at the top that has a lot of power and a generally consistent long-term version they’re executing on. Distributed decision making might be a bit stronger but there’s also no real laws to speak of with lots of forgiveness if things turn out well.

Also the motives are drastically different. Government is about creating the best structure for a bunch of humans to cohabitate with a shared value system. Corporations typically are about amassing power, wealth, and influence over governments.