The Enemy Within

As some of you already know, I’ve been teaching a class on strategic management issues for the University for the past few years, and one of the things we cover is how to look for threats in your environment. The competition is the most obvious factor, assuming you have any direct competitors, but one also needs to keep an eye on things like suppliers and vendors, growing or declining demographic groups, government regulations, evolving technology, and so on. We also touch on threats – or weaknesses, at least – that originate within the company, including things that it doesn’t do well, difficulty in obtaining capital, supply chain and logistics issues, accounting and operations problems, customer service and the like. However, after reading a story that came out of Orlando today, I’m starting to think I should include “employees who are trying to destroy you” on the list of threats – or weaknesses, at least…

You can pick up the original story from the Orlando Sentinel site if you want, but what happened was that the company which makes the popular “Whack A Mole” games for children discovered that one of their employees was building a software fault that would make all of their machines fail after 50 to 500 random plays. In the short run, this would make the programmer indispensible to the company, and thus protect him from being fired or downsized, but in the long run he appears to have been planning to start his own company and sell customers who had purchased one of the “defective” machines a software module that would eliminate the fault. The scheme might even have worked – if he hadn’t started bragging about it…

At first glance, it seems like a bolt from out of a clear blue sky – any company could have saboteurs on the payroll – but given that the penalties for being caught include losing your job, losing your career, and being charged with a felony that carries a 15-year jail term, it’s not something we usually need to worry about as managers. Except that when you read the details of the case, it turns out that the employee was being paid as a contractor until the company bullied him into becoming a regular employee, whereupon he started writing the booby-trapped code and making plans to go into business for himself full-time. We can only speculate on whether the change in employment status included a loss of pay, freedom, or favorable working conditions, but it’s hard to imagine anyone going to this much trouble to screw over an employer that had given him or her a BETTER employment package…

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that the employee’s actions are defensible, regardless of how the company had treated him in the past; what I am suggesting is that they were predictable – or should have been. One can never be certain, of course, but an alert management team should have some idea of whether their employees are happy and satisfied with their compensation and working conditions, and they should definitely keep an eye on anyone they have forced to undergo this sort of radical change. At the very least, they should have caught on when the software failures first began to appear. The unfortunate truth is that employee sabotage is rare, but it’s hardly impossible, which makes it a genuine threat to any business. You can contain it by working closely with your employees, maintaining good relationships with any who are in critical jobs, and instituting incentive programs (and employee ownership programs where applicable) that make it worthwhile for every employee to enforce quality control measures and guard against sabotage. But ignoring the possibility is like putting a bag over your head and dancing in traffic…

Maybe I will update those lesson plans…