Web 2.0 And How To Sabotage A Business

Thanks to David Weinberger for his post on the enterprise 2.0 conference.

Dave... "At the Enterprise 2.0 conference (which I didn’t attend), Don Burke and Sean Dennehey from the CIA gave a talk on Intellipedia, the CIA’s internal wikipedia. As part of their talk, they cited a manual, including, I’m told, this from page 28:

1. Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
2. Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length.
   Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of per­sonal
   experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate “patriotic”
   comments.
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 juris­ diction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.

Their point was that these instructions come from a 1944 manual on how to sabotage a business."

Here's a link to the conference page.

On the flip side, here are some web 2.0 ideas for businesses:

• One of a suite of Web 2.0 tools including:

  • Content aggregation, filtering, and distribution and

  • Blogs for communication

  • Tag|Connect (similar to the Internet's del.icio.us) for organization

  • CMS (a content management system for file sharing community-wide)

  • Gallery (similar to the Internet's flickr)

  • Video (similar to YouTube)

  • Instant Messaging

  • Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and XML