The CIA’s “Simple Sabotage Field Manual” shows a lot of resemblance to how Japanese companies operate.

8 comments

1. I think these apply to bureaucracies all over the world in general, but these two do really sound like a typical Japanese company:

   1. Hold conferences when there is more, critical work to be done.
   2. Multiply paper work in plausible ways. Start duplicate files.

   While this one is more often used by gaijins (Nihongi tabemasen!):

   1. Even it you understand the language, pretend not to understand instructions in a foreign tongue.

2. It reads like an analysis of the drawbacks of any overly verticalized organizational structure. Japanese corps are world leaders in this field 😉

3. Would make sense, given that Japan was treated as a test case in social engineering in the years of occupation following the war.

4. Pretty sure that whomever trained my bosses used this manual.

5. Too stupid to understand. Can some please explain??

6. I feel obligated to point out that, when the Apple 2 personal computer hit the market, IBM was caught without a competing product to sell. They knew that their internal bureaucracy was so burdensome that it would take them 2 years *to ship an empty box*, so they hired an outside engineer to develop the “IBM PC” from off-the-shelf parts. Of course they also needed an operating system, and somehow they found a guy (Bill Gates) who knew a guy who had developed DOS, and Bill Gates bought DOS and then *licensed it* to IBM.

   About 20 years later, Microsoft was pretty much taking over the world and IBM was nearly bankrupt.

   No doubt I misremembered some part of the legend. I welcome corrections and tweaks.

7. I’m not supposed to understand Japanese when I can speak it fluently.

   Japan is ruled by vampires

8. I feel so incredibly blessed to be living in Japan for years, and have zero idea what it’s like to work for a Japanese company. Posts after post, talk after talk irl, it seems like a nightmare in bizarro world.