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Corporate Cynics: Survival Kit

Stijn Dejongh and Koen Vastmans

The Corporate Cynics: Survival Guide bundles two sharp, unsentimental books for people navigating modern organizations with their eyes open. Together, they dissect how well-intended practices turn into dysfunction, how slogans replace thinking, and why clarity so often loses to comfort. Not motivational. Not prescriptive. Just honest tools for recognizing what’s really going on — and deciding what to do about it.

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The Corporate Cynics: Survival Guide bundles two sharp, unsentimental books for people navigating modern organizations with their eyes open. Together, they dissect how well-intended practices turn into dysfunction, how slogans replace thinking, and why clarity so often loses to comfort.

Not motivational. Not prescriptive. Just honest tools for recognizing what’s really going on — and deciding what to do about it.

The Corporate Sabotage Field Guide, by Stijn Dejongh, approaches organizational failure from an inverted angle. Framed as a satirical field manual, it catalogs familiar corporate practices — peer reviews, KPIs, alignment rituals, culture initiatives — and shows how they are routinely weaponized to erode trust, stall momentum, and drain responsibility, often without bad intent. Beneath the dark humor sits a serious diagnostic lens: a pattern-based exploration of how incentives, structures, and habits combine into systemic sabotage. It’s written for managers, practitioners, and individual contributors who sense that “something is off”, and want language for what they are already experiencing.

Debunking DevOps Delusions, by Koen Vastmans, tackles a related problem from another angle: the myths, slogans, and cargo-cult thinking that dominate modern delivery and transformation efforts. Drawing on decades of experience, it systematically dismantles popular narratives around DevOps, agility, and maturity models, exposing how shallow interpretations and misaligned incentives undermine the very outcomes they claim to support. Rather than replacing one dogma with another, the book restores nuance, context, and critical thinking to conversations that have become overly simplified.

Taken together, these books form a practical survival guide for corporate life: one that helps you recognize destructive patterns, question seductive stories, and understand how systems shape behavior long before individuals do. They won’t tell you what to believe — but they may help you see your workplace more clearly, and choose your responses with a bit more intention.

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ManagementEntertainmentLeadershipAgile Enterprise

Books

About the Books

Corporate Sabotage Field Guide

Management-Level Techniques for Systemic Disruption and Psychological Erosion

Stijn Dejongh

The Corporate Sabotage Field Guide is a black-ops satire disguised as a tactical handbook for middle management.


Styled after wartime field manuals and insurgency playbooks, this book examines how ordinary corporate practices — peer reviews, KPIs, onboarding programs, alignment rituals — quietly become mechanisms of dysfunction. Each technique mirrors a familiar behavior, subtly weaponized to undermine trust, ownership, and progress while remaining perfectly respectable on paper.

Beneath the satire lies a serious diagnostic lens: a pattern-based exploration of how incentives, structures, and habits erode effectiveness without requiring bad intent or obvious villains. The goal is not to prescribe fixes, but to make hidden mechanisms visible.

Ideal for the cynical practitioner, the burned-out individual contributor, the frustrated agile coach, or the manager who suspects the system is working exactly as designed — just not in anyone’s favor.


Included features:

  • Dozens of sabotage patterns drawn from real organizational behavior
  • Reinforcing pattern combinations that compound damage across teams
  • A narrative case study illustrating how sabotage unfolds over time
  • A tone that stays uncomfortably close to lived experience


Reader discretion advised.
Prolonged exposure may result in pattern recognition, uncomfortable clarity, or the realization that you’ve accidentally implemented some of these techniques yourself.

Debunking DevOps Delusions

Save yourself from a DevOOPS! experience

Koen Vastmans

When it comes to DevOps, you often hear or read some misconceptions, delusions if you like. For example:

DevOps is about delivering faster.

Sounds familiar? This book covers 30 of such delusions.

Divided over 6 chapters, you will get food for thought about different aspects of DevOps, including people, technologies, security, release and deploy. With a sense of humor, this book also helps you discover things that will not bring you closer to a DevOps organization.

If you are looking for ready to use solutions, like in a cook book, to transform your organization to a DevOps organization, you may be disappointed. This book doesn't pretend to have all the answers; above all, it provides a lot of questions.

Then why should you read this book?

To save yourself from a DevOOPS! experience.

This book is based on a series of LinkedIn posts that I wrote about DevOps Bull$#!t, between July 2024 and February 2025.

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