Slow-walk. Delay a task on purpose while appearing to work on it.
Drag one’s feet. Move slowly because one does not want to do something.
Pay lip service. Say that one supports something without acting on it.
Flavor of the month. A new program from management that people expect to disappear soon.
Wait it out. Do nothing until the change goes away.
In 1974 the management scholar Jerry B. Harvey published “The Abilene Paradox: The Management of Agreement.” It begins with a family in Coleman, Texas, playing dominoes. The father-in-law suggests driving 50 miles to Abilene for dinner. “Sounds like a great idea,” says the wife. “Sounds good to me,” says the husband. “Of course I want to go,” says the mother-in-law.
The trip is miserable. Back home, each of them admits that they never wanted to go. Each had gone along with what they thought the others wanted.
On January 17, 1944, the Office of Strategic Services, the American wartime intelligence agency, issued the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. Part of it told ordinary citizens in occupied countries how to slow down organizations from the inside. “Insist on doing everything through ‘channels.'” “Make ‘speeches.’ Talk as frequently as possible and at great length.” “When possible, refer all matters to committees, for ‘further study and consideration.'”
The manual was declassified in 2008.
American IT departments have a name for technology that employees use without the IT department’s knowledge. They call it shadow IT. According to the research firm Gartner, “41% of employees acquired, modified, or created technology outside of IT’s visibility in 2022.”
Before Dwight Eisenhower became president, Harry Truman imagined the general at the president’s desk. “He’ll sit here,” Truman would say, tapping his desk, “and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen. Poor Ike—it won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.”
The remark is quoted in Presidential Power (1960), a book by the political scientist Richard Neustadt.
In the early 1950s, the psychologist Solomon Asch asked students at Swarthmore College to take what they thought was a vision test. They had to say which of three lines matched the length of another line. The answer was obvious. But the other people in the room were Asch’s assistants, and on some rounds they all gave the same wrong answer out loud.
About 75 percent of the real participants went along with the wrong answer at least once.
In the film Office Space (1999), a waitress at the restaurant chain Chotchkie’s wears 15 buttons on her uniform. The restaurant calls them “flair.” Fifteen is the minimum.
Her manager calls her in to talk about it. She has done what the rules require. He tells her that the company wants her to express herself. Some coworkers, he says, wear more flair than the minimum. It is up to her, he says, whether she wants to do only the bare minimum.
Variety called Chotchkie’s “Friday’s-esque.” In 2004 the film’s writer and director, Mike Judge, said that about four years after the film came out, Friday’s “got rid of all that flair.”
Walmart publishes the ten rules that its founder Sam Walton set out for building a business. Rule 5 is about praise: “Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free — and worth a fortune.” Rule 6 says: “Have fun. Show enthusiasm — always.”
Walton once saw employees at a South Korean tennis ball factory reciting a morning cheer. In 1975 he introduced a Walmart cheer to his own company, and it became part of Walmart’s culture.
An American phrase that went global in 2022, describing an employee who does their job and nothing beyond it. The phrase calls that quitting. Doing what you were hired to do is framed as a partial withdrawal.
American quit rates reached record levels in 2021 and 2022, and the phenomenon was widely attributed to a reassessment of what work should cost a person. It was expressed as millions of individual departures rather than as any change in law or policy.