Annoying Management Technique #2367: The Chaos Bomb

This technique works especially well if you’re at the vice-president level, where you are powerful enough to cause huge swaths of damage, like a hurricane aimed at a trailer park, but not close enough to the actual frontline work to be anything other than completely ignorant with how the real marketplace works.

First, you want to pick an employee who has been working on a project for months, maybe even more than a year. This project should be important to the division, to the company, and especially to 50 to 60 people who depend on that project for a living. And to that employee, it should be his universe, the thing that occupies his every thought and dream, the thing that makes him lose sleep, lose his appetite, and lose his hard-on at critical moments.

As the v.p., you don’t want to actually say anything to the target for a few months. If you do, say nice things, “keep up the good work,” and such. Make the employee think everything is fine. Let him develop a false sense of security.

Then a day or so before the crucial moment that the project is launched and sent to the public, where it might actually make some money, send a small, short, blunt email to the direct manager of the target. (You can’t do this to direct reports, as they might have access to you. Your target should be two or three levels below you, ensuring insulation and limiting feedback. Actual communication might prevent the carnage you want to wreak, so keep the messages going to voice mail and the email unreturned.)

The email you send should say something like: “That thing you’ve been working on? When it launches, do everything differently, but don’t miss your sales targets. Thanks.”

For instance, if the product was meant to be sold in retail stores, and the target has spent months greasing the wheels with the corporate retail sales department, flying around the country meeting with retail buyers, working the trade shows shaking hands and selling his ass off to store mangers, and setting elaborate and expensive in-store promotions set up – you want to completely eliminate all that work and make the target start from scratch.

In that case, the email should say something like: “As an experiment, we want to distribute that product through the corporate online store only. Thanks.”

Don’t bother justifying your decision. You’re a v.p. You must be pretty bright, right? Don’t bother talking to the target about what his thoughts on the strategy are, or what his strategy has been for the past year. And you should ignore all other input from other parts of the company, some of whom were depending on revenue on that project.

The idea is to do damage, not talk. You’re a busy man. You have vacations to plan, video games to play, long lunches to take with minor celebrities, board member asses to kiss. If you want to completely screw a product launch for the sake of an “experiment” what the hell? It’s the target that will get fired (and the team that worked on the project). Not you. You golf with the CEO once a month and let him win. You are perfectly safe. Sleep well, young v.p. Your job is done.