Sabotaging Ourselves
April 18, 2023 by Elio GriecoMeeting: Monday, May 1st, 2023, 6:00-9:00pm MST
We're finally meeting in person again in May! We are meeting in Room 1330 of the South Building at GateWay Community College. Details below.
Attend in Person
Room SO 1330 in the South Building at GateWay Community College, Washington Campus.
108 N 40th St,
Phoenix, AZ 85034
Map link to the Exact Location
Attend Virtually
Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/3913516624
Meeting ID: 391 351 6624
One tap mobile
+13462487799,,3913516624# US (Houston)
+16694449171,,3913516624# US
Food
Free pizza and soft drinks will be provided to all attendees. If you have other preferences, Speedy Street Tacos is within walking distance, just past the East parking lot. There are also a few other restaurants within a short drive of the college.
Schedule
- 6:00 - 6:30pm: Networking and Food
- 6:30 - 6:40pm: Meeting Start and Announcements
- 6:40 - 7:00pm: Cyber Threat Updates by Erik Graham
- 7:10 - 8:45pm: Sabotaging Ourselves
- 8:45 - 9:00pm: Wrap Up and Networking
May Topic: Sabotaging Ourselves
Does it feel like it takes a miracle to get anything done in the business world?
While good process is essential in a well functioning organization, bad process is poison. The CIA (then the OSS) realized that massive inefficiencies could be used to slow down our enemies' war machines. In the second world war they wrote a manual of such practices and distributed it behind enemy lines. Many of the practices from section 11 "General Interference with Organizations and Production" are widespread in corporate America today.
Well talk about these practices, their impact on organizations, and the threat to US industry and national security posed by their widespread adoption. We are literally sabotaging ourselves.
See the resources below for more information and pre-meeting study materials for those that are keenly interested in this topic.
Articles
- Advice From The CIA: How Poor Management Can… | Corporate Rebels
- Read the CIA's Simple Sabotage Field Manual: A Timeless Guide to Subverting Any Organization with "Purposeful Stupidity" (1944) | Open Culture
- The Early Spy Manual That Turned Bad Middle Management Into An Espionage Tactic - Atlas Obscura
- SIMPLE SABOTAGE FIELD MANUAL. I came across an amazing document… | by Sergey Zelvenskiy | Medium
- Stop. | Are you a saboteur at work? How the CIA made organizations ineffective
Additional Reading
- What management culture shares with the 1930s Soviet Union | Fortune
- Opening a Restaurant in Boston Takes 92 Steps, 22 Forms, 17 Office Visits, and $5,554 in 12 Fees. Why? | Inc.com
- Dangerous Professionals: Hacking the Bureaucracy to Get Stuff Done
- Becoming Data Driven in Business: A Series - Commoncog
- Make It Safe for Employees to Speak Up — Especially in Risky Times
The Full Manual
- SOE & CIA Training Manual (from the Internet Archive)
- Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1945) (from DHS)
- CleanedUOSSSimpleSabotage_sm.pdf
Mail Change: announce@swcsf.org
We've been doing some testing and mail from the swcsf.org domain is not yet reliably making it through to everyone. Seems like we need to do some more work to build the domain reputation. Ah the state of modern email.
Emails will be sent from both the previous address as well as announce@swcsf.org for the time being. Please make sure that you are receiving mail from announce@swcsf.org. Our apologies for the duplication.
The switch from the gmail address to our official address is likely to be a gradual process.