A friend of mine recently told me, “Your blog sucks.  If you aren’t going to write about business, then you need to write about personal stuff.  Otherwise, what’s the point?”

Now, I didn’t want to get into a debate of the value of SEO and owning your own brand name, so I took the point to heart.  So this post gets a little into a little bit of personal opinion on business.

I’ve waited a long time to write about this, mainly because I don’t want to embarrass anyone, and I want to keep the players in this story anonymous.  I’ve worked at a lot of places, and as a consultant I’ve been inside a number of organizations and groups, so I’ve changed some characteristics in order to hide the true identity of the players here.

Let’s begin.  I was recently told a tale by a long time colleague of mine.  This colleague wove a story about sharing drinks with an ex-coworker of mine, who likely didn’t know the two if them shared a connection with me. My colleague was caught off guard when this ex-coworker said something along the lines of, “I like to use jedi mind tricks of people I work with.  If I don’t like them, I’ll wait for them to have a really bad idea, then I’ll tell them it’s a great idea so they’ll go forth with it.  Then when they fail, they look dumb.  It’s really pretty easy to do.”

My colleague was pretty aghast, and he was especially shocked since this woman was involved with HR back in the days when I worked with her.   It led us to a discussion about “Intentional Acts of Destruction” inside companies.

Sure, nothing the woman did was illegal.  But what kind of long term issues did it cause for her company and group, to push forward ideas that were not in the best interest of the business?  What kind of resource drain was it for any man hours to be spent on research or exploration?  Where could those man hours have been better spent?

But more importantly, how many people think this way?  Maybe if you have one employee who does this, it gets cancelled out by the mass of the organization.  But suppose there is one person in each group who thinks this way?

Furthermore, as a manager, how do you decipher the evil from the ignorant?  If you want to allow your employees a lot of blue sky to fly in, how do you know when an idea is being endorsed by the rest of the team because they believe in it, or because it’s part of a sabotage effort?

We couldn’t answer any of these questions.  But we agreed that it was one of those management problems they don’t teach you in business school.  We like to think that we can follow a handbook, and that we work with well intentioned people who have the best interest of the team at heart.  But the reality is that some people don’t.  And the hard thing is, unless they drink in bars and share their misguided thoughts with others, we never know who endorses our ideas because they agree, and who is looking to execute an Intentional Act of Destruction.  It’s a good lesson for all of us to keep in mind when we head into the office.