Fred Williams: How to Sabotage a Project

On Tuesday, September 30, 2014, Fred Williams, owner of Williams Technical, provided another installment of the UNYP/CVUT entrepreneurship lecture series.  Fred’s talk centered on the intentional or unintentional acts that cause great damage, usually at very low cost, and very low risk.  

Sabotage has varied etymological theories, from the Dutch shoes being thrown into machinery to railroad ties being torn up.  Sabotage examples in history are numerous, from the Bible to wars to current business practices.  The CIA created a field guide for sabotage.  Interestingly, the book suggests numerous meetings, long speeches, committees, discussion of irrelevant topics, arguments over wording, requirements for higher approval, and advising caution.  These, of course, are commonplace practices in business. 

Managers have many opportunities to sabotage their business/project.  This is possible through having people with specific, unshared knowledge who can hold the business/project hostage by refusing to share that knowledge.  Rewarding incompetence and punishing success is another.  Workers can sabotage efforts by spreading rumors, slacking off, and pretending not to understand (or similarly, failing to put forth a slight effort to achieve understanding).  Finally, Fred discussed the strength of redundancy, and the weakness and fragility of efficient and complex systems.  It is much easier to sabotage these complex systems. 

UNYP, CVUT, and Inovacentrum thank all wish to thank Fred Williams for his time, expertise, and ideas in this lecture.

Related Articles

UNYP Chronicle Newsletter

The e-mail address you provide will be used only to send you the newsletter. Your privacy is important to us.

For more information download our UNYP Brochure.


UNYP logo

Contacts

University of New York in Prague
Londýnská 41, 120 00 Praha


ID no: 25676598
Phone: +420 224 221 261   Skype
Email: unyp@unyp.cz

Back to top