This is actually a tactic listed in the official CIA “Simple Sabotage” handbook. Basically, if you can’t overtly sabotage things by blowing them up while maintaining your cover, work to sabotage things from inside instead.
Get a job in middle management, and do everything in your power to live up to the term “middle manglement”. Do your job as poorly as possible while still maintaining plausible deniability. Make it difficult for people around you to do their jobs. Give other managers bad info. Sow division via gossip. Divert employees towards busy work so they can’t focus on important tasks. Waste budgets. Ensure deadlines get missed, while demanding unreasonable deadlines for other teams. Et cetera…
And I can guarantee that generals will be well aware of this fact. Plenty of them got into their spots by being war dogs, but they won’t be stupid.
Years ago, I read an article by a Democrat who got a job working for a local Republican campaign office, just so he could be incompetent at it.
While he was sabotaging things, he caught the flu. He came to work anyway, and smeared his flu-ridden saliva on doorknobs, computer keyboards and mouses, etc. Within a week, most of the office was sick, in the middle of a big campaign.
In every company I’ve worked for that had middle managers, they spent 80% of their time trying to justify their position with self-assigned busy work to try to look useful for the company.
This is actually a tactic listed in the official CIA “Simple Sabotage” handbook. Basically, if you can’t overtly sabotage things by blowing them up while maintaining your cover, work to sabotage things from inside instead.
Get a job in middle management, and do everything in your power to live up to the term “middle manglement”. Do your job as poorly as possible while still maintaining plausible deniability. Make it difficult for people around you to do their jobs. Give other managers bad info. Sow division via gossip. Divert employees towards busy work so they can’t focus on important tasks. Waste budgets. Ensure deadlines get missed, while demanding unreasonable deadlines for other teams. Et cetera…
And I can guarantee that generals will be well aware of this fact. Plenty of them got into their spots by being war dogs, but they won’t be stupid.
Years ago, I read an article by a Democrat who got a job working for a local Republican campaign office, just so he could be incompetent at it.
While he was sabotaging things, he caught the flu. He came to work anyway, and smeared his flu-ridden saliva on doorknobs, computer keyboards and mouses, etc. Within a week, most of the office was sick, in the middle of a big campaign.
You just described every middle manager ever.
What if all middle managers are just plants from competing companies?
In every company I’ve worked for that had middle managers, they spent 80% of their time trying to justify their position with self-assigned busy work to try to look useful for the company.