Our situation at work isn't quite analogous to this, but boy oh boy did this part stand out to me:

But a larger part of it was that people in the development team were just showing up to work, and not much else. I had a friend once at Digital who gave me this unforgettable advice, right after we were bought by Compaq:

“When captured by the enemy, it is best to display model prisoner behavior.”

And that was exactly what had happened here. It wasn’t that people were deliberately trying to sabotage progress, they were showing up to work and doing their jobs as instructed. But nothing more.