

How We Beat the Nazis with Bureaucracy - Calamitous
http://volokh.com/2010/06/01/sabotage-or-how-dilbert-won-the-war/

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dkarl
Bureaucracy, like anything else, can be done well or poorly. When talking
about bureaucracy we should keep in mind how we feel when people use the word
"technology" to refer exclusively to harmful or inept applications of
technology.

So here's a story that might divide HN into two camps:

I met a guy through a friend and it turned out we were both in software
development. I told him a humorous story about a really awful bureaucratic
situation at work, and how I was able to manipulate management to do what I
wanted. He said, "Sounds like a lot of leadership," and I replied, "Oh, yeah,
there was leadership all over the place, it was awful, but in the end the
right thing got done." By the expression on his face I could tell he had never
heard "leadership" used in a negative way before. He actually used
"leadership" to refer to what I did to solve the problem. "Devious
obsequiousness" would have been a better term, but he was trained to label any
kind of effort with a positive outcome "leadership."

So, I wonder how many HNers think "leadership" has positive, negative, or
neutral connotations....

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grellas
Key admonitions:

(a) Organizations and Conferences (1) Insist on doing everything through
"channels." (2) Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite
decisions. . . . (3) 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. (4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently
as possible. (5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes,
resolutions. (6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and
attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision. (7)
Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be
"reasonable" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or
difficulties later on. (8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision -
raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the
jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some
higher echelon.

(b) Managers and Supervisors (1) Demand written orders. . . . (7) Insist on
perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing
those which have the least flaw. . . . . . . (10) To lower morale and with it,
production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved
promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about
their work. (11) Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
(12) Multiply paper work in plausible ways. Start duplicate files. (13)
Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, pay
checks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one
would do. (14) Apply all regulations to the last letter.

Nothing wrong here. Just a lot of lawyer-types trying to get things done in
the way they know best :).

~~~
arethuza
There must be some ISO standard for this stuff - that sounds so much like the
British Civil Service.

~~~
forinti
Maybe we could retroactively grant the Nazis some certification.

------
tokenadult
The comment on the submitted blog post about the Reich Ministry of Production
being destroyed by a British bombing raid is food for thought. The claim is
that killing bureaucrats of the Nazi government raised German military
production for the remainder of the war--probably not the result the Allies
intended.

~~~
jacquesm
America has a similar problem with lawyers getting their fingers in more and
more pies, makes you wonder what would happen to productivity if everybody
decided to stop suing each other for a couple of years.

~~~
pavel_lishin
<http://imgur.com/FD0pK.jpg>

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scott_s
It's amusing to read the documents now, but this was serious stuff during
WWII. I first learned about it when I read "IBM and the Holocaust"
(<http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/>) by Edwin Black. There was a French
bureaucrat who was part of occupied France's government who practiced this
form of bureaucratic sabotage. I wish I could remember his name. He was
eventually found out by the Nazis and died in a concentration camp.

~~~
darnton
"France excelled at many things. Punch card automation was not one of them."

Rene Carmille founded the Demographic Service in Vichy France and began
conducting the first decent Jewish census in France because previous efforts
had been such a shambles.

He took lots of German money to put together a punch card operation and set to
work but failed to produce many names and addresses of Jewish families.
However, he did manage to secretly put together a list of 300,000 veterans and
others to mobilise as part of the Free French army when the allies invaded.

He was tortured and killed by Klaus Barbie in 1944.

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tjmaxal
PLEASE REFRAIN FROM COMMENT POSTING unless your post has been approved by
committee and submitted in triplicate, color coded forms.

~~~
zephjc
And don't forget to use the new cover sheet. You _did_ get the memo, right?

~~~
arethuza
tjmaxal doesn't have the authority include himself into the distribution list
for those memos.

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jmount
I would need to see a lot of good attribution/documentation to be convinced
this is not a forgery. I have seen so many different versions of this that it
stinks like an urban legend. It is the "organizational man" version of the
"protocols of the elders of Zion" and is often attributed to the 1950s
"communist 5th column working in the US."

~~~
sp332
Here's the original: [http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26184/page-
images/26184-image...](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26184/page-
images/26184-images.pdf)

~~~
jmount
I think I stand corrected.

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tjmaxal
Where are the six sigma standards for this people? This post clearly isn't up
to code.

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blogimus
What is old is new again

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=833443>

------
ErrantX
I think we've proven time and time again that "anal" Beurocracy is absolutely
a destructive and time consuming force :)

It's probably one of the most disruptive ideas in that handbook!

(the handbook has been posted here in the past too; I can't find the
commentary around that just now)

------
dkarl
This is also known as work-to-rule: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-
rule>

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zeynel1
from comments: "Another one, not yet ripe in 1943, is to require non-job-
related mandatory annual training in such areas as diversity, sexual
harassment, ethnic sensibilities, etc. Especially as critical deadlines
approach. Use outside consultants to provide training. Put the whole
requirement under a cost sink department like HR. Tie HR performance bonuses
to 100% compliance goal."

Hilarious. I had to go through one of these time wastes for "customer support
training" recently: the outside consultant's one advice was: "don't say 'no
problem' to a request because it may imply negativity."

