15 quotes
Elizabeth is smart, ruthless, and emotionally damaged; that is, she is a sales representative.
Company (2006)
Ninety-five percent of all jobs suck, Jones. That’s why people get paid to do them.
Company (2006)
People talk about bedroom eyes; well, Megan has the whole suite.
Company (2006)
There’s no requirement that jobs be meaningful, Jones. If there was, half the country would be unemployed.
Company (2006)
You can say this for Senior Management: it knows how to articulate a goal. The strategy may be fuzzy, the execution nonexistent, but Senior Management knows what it wants.
Company (2006)
Senior Management may have been incompetent; it may have been corrupt; it was certainly full of assholes—but they were their incompetent, corrupt assholes.
Company (2006)
Someone tried to tell me the other day that the only habitable place in America is California. But I just don’t understand how you could spend your life restricted to summer outfits.
Company (2006)
The atmosphere of desperate, ignorant terror essential to healthy rumors seeps away, replaced by a silent, wary paranoia. People bunker down, jealously keeping what they know, which is nothing, to themselves.
Company (2006)
But what can I say? That’s how business works. Nobody gives a crap about ethics. That’s why people like me will always be successful.
Company (2006)
He is looking for something called The Omega Management System, which is the latest management fad in a tradition stretching back through Six Sigma and Total Quality Management to the practice of bleeding sick patients and investing in tulips.
Company (2006)
The departments don’t report the problem because a good manager knows the only reason to call Senior Management, ever, is to deliver good news. People who ring Senior Management with problems do not have much of a future at Zephyr Holdings. Senior Management is not there to hold departmental hands. It is there to dispense stock options.
Company (2006)
Last month we had to sit through a presentation on eliminating redundancy, and it was a bunch of PowerPoint slides, plus a guy reading out what was on the slides, and then he gave us all hard copies.
Company (2006)
The only thing more amazing than the catalog of brutal methods the company uses to demean its workers is that it thinks it’s helping. Not that the employees are going to say this. Positive feedback is taken very seriously, often ending up in annual reports, but negative feedback leads to HR investigations into employee attitude problems.
Company (2006)
Like every other department in Zephyr, Training Sales has an open floor plan, which means everyone works in a sprawling cubicle farm except the manager, who has an office with a glass internal wall, across which blinds are permanently drawn. Open-plan seating, it has been explained in company-wide memos, increases teamwork, and boosts productivity. Except in managers, that is, whose productivity tends to be boosted by—and the memos don’t say this, but the conclusion is inescapable—corner offices with excellent views.
Company (2006)
How she became manager remains a mystery. But there are only two possibilities. One is that Senior Management mistook her tirades for drive and a commitment to excellence. The other is that they knew Sydney was a paranoid psychopath, and that’s exactly the kind of person they want in management.
Company (2006)