How Businesses Sabotage Themselves: Lessons from a 1944 CIA Manual
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S1 E28

How Businesses Sabotage Themselves: Lessons from a 1944 CIA Manual

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During World War II, the OSS (precursor to the CIA) released the “Simple Sabotage Field Manual”—a handbook for disrupting enemy organisations from within. The shocking part? Much of it reads like a modern business playbook: excessive committees, slow decision-making, perfectionism on unimportant tasks, and endless meetings.

In this episode, we unpack the uncanny overlap between sabotage tactics and today’s workplace behaviours, why they persist even with good intentions, and how leaders can spot and dismantle them before they derail performance.

It’s a reminder that agility isn’t about speed — it’s about removing the hidden habits of sabotage baked into our ways of working.

--> View the associated post on Cultivated website - https://www.cultivatedmanagement.com/we-are-sabotaging-our-own-workplaces/

Creators and Guests

Rob Lambert
Host
Rob Lambert
I’m Rob Lambert. Founder of Cultivated, Creative Director of Creative Soul Projects, host of Here's an idea worth playing with, and co-host of Stationery Freaks podcast.