Woman Does As Told, Makes Sure She Has Signed Receipts For When Boss’s Mistake Backfires, And It Does

If you want to watch an organization mess up, you should pray for a whole bunch of bureaucratic mismanagement and an iron-clad adherence to protocol. When one internet user saw these two things brewing at her workplace, she did her best to apply the brakes to an expensive transaction.

However, the employee couldn’t do it alone—she needed her bosses’ help. In a viral post in the ‘Malicious Compliance’ online group, the worker vented about how her superiors wouldn’t budge no matter what. So, all that she could do was strap in and watch as the trainwreck unfolded.

Judging from the story, it's no surprise that the organization is struggling. In studying declining companies, senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management Donald Sull found that their issues stem from decision makers' inability to take appropriate action.

"There can be many reasons for the problem—ranging from managerial stubbornness to sheer incompetence—but one of the most common is a condition that I call active inertia," Sull writes.

"Inertia is usually associated with inaction—picture a billiard ball at rest on a table—but physicists also use the term to describe a moving object's tendency to persist in its current trajectory. Active inertia is an organization's tendency to follow established patterns of behavior ... Stuck in the modes of thinking and working that brought success in the past, [they] simply accelerate all their tried-and-true activities."

After reading posts like this one, it might seem that good bosses are rare. And that's true. Gallup has found that one of the most important decisions companies make is simply who they name a manager, yet they usually get it wrong. In fact, companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the job 82% of the time.

Which is a pretty huge deal when you take into account that managers account for at least 70% of variance in employee engagement scores. Many of whom are probably actively embracing malicious compliance, in one form or another.