Jane Poynter Quotes

I think the corporate world is pretty starved for personality. The reason you have comic strips like 'Dilbert' and sitcoms like 'The Office' is that people just can't be genuine human beings in a corporate environment. So if you can really be your own self, even if it's a little bit different, I think people are really drawn to that.

I won't be making any friends in the corporate suites.

I'm challenging the assumption that you need to be a dog-eat-dog person to survive in a corporate environment.

CEOs can talk and blab each day about culture, but the employees all know who the jerks are. They could name the jerks for you. It's just cultural. People just don't want to do it.

Culture is what happens when the CEO isn't in the room.

Average people push great people out of a company.

If you make believe that ten guys in pin-striped suits are back in a kindergarten class playing with building blocks, you'll get a rough picture of what life in a corporation is like.

Some of my unhappiest moments have been in organizations. Somehow it seems to be quite respectable to do things in organizations that you would never do in private life. I have had people insult me to my face in front of colleagues. I have had my feelings rammed down my throat on the pretext that it would do me good. I have been required to do things which I didn't agree with because the organization wished it... In my worst moments I have thought organizations were places designed to be run by sadists and staffed by masochists.

We find that when we make an acquisition, or we have a hiring experience, that's one of the hardest things to change. If you've been working for a company where you didn't dare challenge your boss, or what's politically correct in the company, then it affects your career.

In every work environment, there will be politics. If you really want to rise to the top, you need to figure out what those politics in your workplace are. Then, you hook it in. You decide what conforms and what does not conform to your personal code.

By the dawn of the millennium, the hallways at Microsoft were no longer home to barefoot programmers in Hawaiian shirts working through nights and weekends toward a common goal of excellence; instead, life behind the thick corporate walls had become staid and brutish.

Sometimes things just click. The one contribution I tried to do, was shield the staff from the corporate politics that occur on any show. But yes, we all got along very well.

Typically, when there are corporate habits that undermine individuals, it has emerged without any sort of central planning. Nobody sits down and says, 'I'm going to create an evil habit for this corporation.'

Office life is very, very strange. It's like no other way of living. You have an intimacy with people who you work with in the office, yet if you meet them on the streets, you both look the other way because you're embarrassed.

Politics exist in the boardroom, as well.

Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.

I worked for Xerox for 4 years and after that I knew I was never going to be a corporate person. It wasn't my environment.

Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned. They are not units but fractions.

The tendency in lots of large organizations is to try and find a comfortable place where you think you can get measured rewards for measured work.

Corporate culture matters. How management chooses to treat its people impacts everything - for better or for worse.

You can look at anything as a cult. Churches are cults in their own way.

Every company has two organizational structures: The formal one is written on the charts; the other is the everyday relationship of the men and women in the organization.

The prevailing system of management has crushed fun out of the workplace.

The show is called 'The Office,' and while it focuses on the people, the architecture of the space is very important.

Public hangings are teaching moments. Every company has to do it. A teaching moment is worth a thousand CEO speeches. CEOs can talk and blab each day about culture, but the employees all know who the jerks are. They could name the jerks for you. It's just cultural. People just don't want to do it.