CIA's Official Guide to Sabotaging Biz Meetings

Meetings are unavoidable in a corporate environment. 

 

Maybe, I was missing some genetic code that makes people enjoy sitting in meetings – but if you are like me, who had been subjected to long-drawn-out meetings, you'll understand what I had to go through. Physical and mental exhaustion is not something I wish for anybody!

 

Meeting fatigue is very real – but you don't have to endure them. You can always choose to fight back! 

 

Equip yourself with cool tips on how to sabotage meetings – some of which I'm sharing here:

• Insist on doing everything through "channels". Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions. 
• Make "speeches". Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points" by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. 
• When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration". Attempt to make the committee as large as possible – never less than five. 
• Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible. 
• Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions. 
• Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision. 
• Advocate "caution". Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.

Believe it or not, the above were instructions found in "General Interference with Organizations and Production", and extracted from the "Simple Sabotage Field Manual", published in 1944 by the US Office of Strategic Services, now the CIA! 

 

This was a top secret guide teaching the average citizen-saboteur how to fuck shit up without specialized tools or equipment or association with an "organized group". Declassified in 2008, the guide encouraged clogging up toilets, letting "cutting tools grow dull", and dumping rice into gasoline engines.