In the 2009 Quentin Tarantino movie Inglorious Basterds, Lieutenant Aldo Raine, played by Brad Pitt, and his titular crew are dropped into France to undertake guerrilla warfare against Nazi occupiers. Towards the end of the movie, we find out that the Basterds report to the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS). This cues perhaps the most memorable quote in the movie, “That’s a Bingo!” by Colonel Hans Landa, played by Christoph Waltz, who won an Oscar for his performance.
The OSS is the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In 1944, it produced a manual called the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. The manual provided helpful tips to “citizen saboteurs” on how to, well, sabotage their occupiers in a variety of ways, including distributing broken glass and nails on roads, cutting telephone and transmission lines, starting fires, clogging up toilets and much more. As an aside, nothing in the manual, as far as I know, recommends something like the mission of the Basterds, but maybe that’s still classified.
What’s especially interesting about the manual is that it didn’t just offer physical sabotage methods. It also offered a how-to on organisational sabotage. The manual reads, “A second type of simple sabotage requires no destructive tools whatsoever and produces physical damage … it is based on universal opportunities to make faulty decisions, to adopt a non-cooperative attitude, and to induce others to follow suit.”
So what are some methods of organisational sabotage? Well, according to the OSS in 1944, if you really wanted to unleash organisational sabotage on the Nazis, here are some of the things you could consider doing:
• Insist on doing everything through “channels”. Never permit shortcuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
• Make “speeches”. Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” with long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.
• When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.
• Haggle over prices, wording of communications, minutes and resolutions.
• Refer to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to reopen 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.
This is just under the Organisations and Conferences sub-section. I can’t resist adding another four under the Managers and Supervisors sub-section.
• Demand written orders.
• Insist on perfect work on relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw.
• Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
• Apply all regulations to the letter.
You see where I’m going with this. You might think this is a satirical document, but it’s all true. You can Google it and you’ll find it on the CIA website. Essentially, according to the OSS in 1944, if you want to organisationally sabotage the Nazis (or anyone, really), the way to do it is to do exactly what so many bureaucracies today do.
When we say “bureaucracy”, we typically think of the government. It is absolutely true that governments are especially bureaucratic. I have had personal experience with this myself, having been in government once before. As the most junior member in the team, any work I did had to be checked by my supervisor, who then had her work checked by her supervisor, who then had his work checked by his supervisor. And each time, even if the work was relatively straightforward, for people to justify their roles, they felt they had to give comments, even for work that had the “least flaw”. Oh, and those comments were given down step by step as well, along each rung of the ladder.
But we should also not pretend that bureaucracies and red tape are limited to the government. Companies, particularly large ones, are also very prone to exacting standards of bureaucracy. Given that this is printed in The Edge, the typical reader would certainly be acutely aware of corporate bureaucracy. Endless meetings which could have been emails, taskforces and committees for their own sake, and a host of rules for “checks and balances” which are really for “cover-your-behind” purposes.
To be clear, it’s not that the opposite is also great — anarchy isn’t going to deliver better performances. But we should always ask ourselves, “Why do we let certain rules persist?” There are some necessary ones for sure, but at the same time, how many rules are there because in the 48 years’ history of the company, one person in 1987 broke a rule once, and so that rule was kept in place to prevent further occurrences, making the lives of everyone else more difficult? Or how many rules are there to just add “checklist” jobs for others? Yes, Malaysia has a history of poor governance, but tightening the screw on governance too much also isn’t ideal. It can come at the expense of innovation and, indeed, performance. For example, board of directors training programmes are now great and comprehensive on governance issues but very light on addressing poor commercial performance.
Coming back to the main idea — the ways governments and corporates operate now are precisely the ways the OSS would have recommended for sabotaging the Nazis — things need to change. In a complex environment, decision-making needs to be quick and iterative. We know that it is rare to get the perfect decisions even after long deliberations, so why bother with perfection? But beyond the arguments of pragmatism, there is another more philosophical reason to really rethink how we do bureaucracy. Much of the bureaucracy now is of the Saya-Yang-Menurut-Perintah kind, providing all kinds of checks to ensure that no one can be held accountable. Without accountability, it’s difficult to have a high-performance culture, let alone a globally competitive one.
To be clear, bureaucracies are important. The term “bureaucracy” has gotten a bad rap — sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly — because what we have collectively done to our organisations has been to essentially sabotage them. But bureaucracies remain integral to any objective. We must find ways to organise ourselves for the task at hand in a way that minimises sabotage. Indeed, the idea that state capacity, or the quality of the government bureaucracy, is key for long-term public policy such as industrial policy, is well-documented in academic research.
In his book, Embedded Autonomy, political scientist Peter Evans argues that predatory states are actually “characterised by a dearth of bureaucracy”. Therefore, it isn’t that less bureaucracy is a good thing; we just need a high-performing bureaucracy. Economists Philipp Barteska and Jay Euijung Lee recently published a paper providing evidence that moving from a subpar bureaucrat to even an average one saw a substantial increase in exports for South Korea between 1965 and 2001. And we need no better evidence than our neighbours to the south to see the value of a high-performing bureaucracy. We really need to quit sabotaging our organisations, public and private.