This piece was co-authored by Rebecca Hinds. Rebecca is the co-founder of Stratio and a Kairos Society fellow. She has a masters in management science from Stanford University.

Several years ago, Microsoft coined the phrase “licking the cookie” to describe “the act of claiming something as something only you can do, but without actually doing it.” The phrase was inspired by an age-old tactic employed by devious children: taking two cookies from a plate, licking one then eating the other, thereby preventing anyone else from consuming the second cookie while the child consumes the first. “Licking the cookie” has become all too common in today’s workplace.

Consider Sony, which once had a reputation for ineffective collaboration across the company, with each of its divisions working as product silos. The implications were especially apparent after the PlayStation 3 launched. Aside from being a game console, the PS3 was also the least expensive Blu Ray player on the market.

Unfortunately, Sony Entertainment wasn’t able to promote the PS3 as a Blue Ray because the company feared that doing so would hurt Sony Electronics Blue Ray sales (which had effectively “licked the cookie”). This was a missed opportunity for Sony who could have taken an even larger slice of the gaming console market at a time when several new players, like the Nintendo wii, were emerging. Since then Sony has made significant progress in breaking down the division silos.

Simple Sabotage Field Manual Recommendation: Hamper official and especially military business by making at least one telephone call a day to an enemy headquarters.

Email is today’s equivalent of the telephone call. McKinsey has found that we spend about 28% of the workplace reading and answering email. The “reply all” button can be especially irksome. It’s a form of simple sabotage that undermines are productivity and efficiency.

Recognizing the dangers of “reply-all”-generated inbox clog, global information, data, and measurement company Nielsen has grayed out the “reply all” on all of its screen. The button is, by default, set to be inactive (though it can be reactivated with an override function). In a memo to 35,000 employees, Andrew Cawood, Nielsen CIO, explained the rational: to eliminate "bureaucracy and inefficiency."

Simple Sabotage Field Manual Recommendation: Engineers should see that trains run slow or make unscheduled stops for plausible reasons.

Startup software engineers are infamous for being late risers, often arriving at the office late into the morning. By the time they are settled in, it’s time for lunch and half the day has been wasted. This type of routine sabotages work output and productivity.

Several months ago, Pivotal Software realized that, if left to their own devices, engineers would “roll into the office around 10 or 11 in the morning. They'd get in to the office, maybe send a few emails ... and then almost immediately break for lunch.” To motivate engineers to arrive earlier, Pivotal began scheduling a company-wide meeting at 9:06am each morning lasting between 5-10 minutes.

The 9:06 start time was strategically selected. According to Rob Mee, founder and CEO, “We thought that if we made it 9am, developers psyching themselves up for the day would think, 'well if it is 9am I'll be late,'" … "So then we thought, 'why don't we make it 9.05am,' but that is too precise, as programmers don't like optimizing, so we went with 9.06am.

Then it became something fun.” The tactic has gone a long way in boosting productivity. Just as a good battle fighter needs to be constantly on the lookout for sabotage activities that can undermine his/her effectiveness on the battlefield, so too do today’s employees. Take a page from Google, Nielsen, Pivotal, and others.

If you’re able to identify sabotage activities, you’ll prevent yourself from feeling like your schedule is clogged up as badly as a fuel tank with sawdust or rice. If you’d like to learn more about simple sabotage in the workplace, check out this podcast and listen to organizational behavior expert Bob Sutton (author of the bestselling No Asshole Rule) and Rebecca Hinds draw more parallels between the Simple Sabotage Manual and the ways businesses undermine themselves and competitors.