Jones says, “What if we could make the company better? If we could change things…make it a better place to… — Max Barry
Jones says, “What if we could make the company better? If we could change things…make it a better place to work. I mean, there are so many things we could do.”
Holly looks at him blankly. Freddy says, “Jones…you’re still new here People suggest ways to improve the company every day. Their ideas go into the suggestion box in the cafeteria—where the cafeteria was, I mean—and they’re never heard from again, except during all-staff meetings when Senior Management picks out the most useless one and announces a cross-functional team to look into it. A year or two later, when everyone’s forgotten about it, we get an e-mail announcing the implementation of something that bears no resemblance to the initial idea and usually has the opposite effect, and in the annual reports this is used as evidence that the company listens and reacts to its workers. That’s what happens when you try to make Zephyr a better place to work.”
p. 208Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
Senior Management may have been incompetent; it may have been corrupt; it was certainly full of assholes—but they were their incompetent, corrupt assholes.
p. 294
“What happened to sticking together? What happened to teamwork?” He gives Holly a dirty look.
“Hey,” Holly says. “You know what Roger told me? He said there’s no such thing as teamwork. It’s a con. The company doesn’t promote teams. If you want to get ahead you have to screw everybody else and look after yourself. Co-workers are competitors. Roger told me the truth: there’s no I in team, but there’s no U, either!”
p. 237
Mona says bravely, “I can’t see how this will work. You can’t abolish Senior Management. Zephyr isn’t a democracy. It’s a corporation.”
“I believe,” Klausman says, “that Jones is advancing the theory that those two concepts are not mutually exclusive.”
p. 289
