Max Barry

"On level 14, Elizabeth is falling in love. This is what makes her such a good sales rep, and an emotional basket case: she falls in love with her customers. It is hard to convey just how wretchedly, boot-lickingly draining it is to be a salesperson. Sales is a business of relationships, and you must cultivate customers with tenderness and love, like cabbages in winter, even if the customer is an egomaniacal asshole you want to hit with a shovel. There is something wrong with the kind of person who becomes a sales rep, or if not, there is something wrong after six months."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"People talk about bedroom eyes; well, Megan has the whole suite."

"There are stories—legends, really—of the “steady job.” Old-timers gather graduates around the flickering light of a computer monitor and tell stories of how the company used to be, back when a job was for life, not just for the business cycle. In those days, there were dinners for employees who racked up twenty-five years—don’t laugh, you, yes, twenty-five years!—of service. In those days, a man didn’t change jobs every five minutes. When you walked down the corridors, you recognized everyone you met; hell, you knew the names of their kids. The graduates snicker. A steady job! They’ve never heard of such a thing. What they know is the flexible job. It’s what they were raised on in business school; it’s what they experienced, too, as they drove a cash register or stacked shelves between classes. Flexibility is where it’s at, not dull, rigid, monotonous steadiness. Flexible jobs allow employees to share in the company’s ups and downs; well, not so much the ups. But when times get tough, it’s the flexible company that thrives. By comparison, a company with steady jobs hobbles along with a ball and chain. The graduates have read the management textbooks and they know the truth: long-term employees are so last century. The problem with employees, you see, is everything. You have to pay to hire them and pay to fire them, and, in between, you have to pay them. They need business cards. They need computers. They need ID tags and security clearances and phones and air-conditioning and somewhere to sit. You have to ferry them to off-site team meetings. You have to ferry them home again. They get pregnant. They injure themselves. They steal. They join religions with firm views on when it’s permissible to work. When they read their e-mail they open every attachment they get, and when they write it they expose the company to enormous legal liabilities. They arrive with no useful skills, and once you’ve trained them, they leave. And don’t expect gratitude! If they’re not taking sick days, they’re requesting compassionate leave. If they’re not gossiping with co-workers, they’re complaining about them. They consider it their inalienable right to wear body ornamentation that scares customers. They talk about (dear God) unionizing. They want raises. They want management to notice when they do a good job. They want to know what’s going to happen in the next corporate reorganization. And lawsuits! The lawsuits! They sue for sexual harassment, for an unsafe workplace, for discrimination in thirty-two different flavors. For—get this—wrongful termination. Wrongful termination! These people are only here because you brought them into the corporate world! Suddenly you’re responsible for them for life? The truly flexible company—and the textbooks don’t come right out and say it, but the graduates can tell that they want to—doesn’t employ people at all. This is the siren song of outsourcing. The seductiveness of the subcontract. Just try out the words: no employees. Feels good, doesn’t it? Strong. Healthy. Supple. Oh yes, a company without employees would be a wondrous thing. Let the workers suck up a little competitive pressure. Let them get a taste of the free market. The old-timers’ stories are fairy tales, dreams of a world that no longer exists. They rest on the bizarre assumption that people somehow deserve a job. The graduates know better; they’ve been taught that they don’t."

"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."

"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."

"He flips to the section on retrenchment. A sacking, the book says, is one of the most harrowing and stressful events you may ever experience—Jones assumes “you” means the person being sacked until he realizes it’s talking about the manager. According to the book, sackings can be highly destabilizing: workers stop thinking about doing their jobs and start thinking about whether they’ll still have them. It then describes a rage of strategies managers can use to harness that fear and uncertainty and jujitsu-throw it into a motivating factor. What Jones doesn’t find in the book—and he doesn’t notice this at first; he has to flick back and forth—is any mention of the retrenched employees. How they might feel, for example, or what might happen to them afterward. It’s kind of creepy. It’s almost as if once they are sacked, they cease to exist."

"“Anyway, my plan. Last week I filed a claim for disability.” “Disability? For what?” “Stupidity.” “Stupidity!” “Think about it. If I’m born stupid, is that my fault? No, I’m just an honest, hardworking Joe, doing my stupid best. And the company can’t sack people who have a disability. It’s a fact.” “Wow. That’s clever.” “Thanks.” He smiles. “See, you just need to know how to work the company.”"

"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."

"“Customers are vermin, Mr. Jones. They infect companies with disease.” He says this with complete solemnity. “A company is a system. It is built to perform a relatively small set of actions over and over, as efficiently as possible. The enemy of systems is variation, and customers produce variation. They want special products. They have unique circumstances. They try to place orders with after-sales support and they direct complaints to sales. My proudest accomplishment, and I am being perfectly honest with you here, Mr. Jones, is not the Omega Management System and it associated revenue stream—which, by the way, is extremely lucrative. It is Zephyr. A customer-free company. Listen to that, Mr. Jones. A customer-free company. In the early days, you know, we tried to simulate customers. It was a disaster. Killed the whole project. When we started again, I cut every department that had external customers. It was like shooting a pack of rabid dogs. Now, I’m not claiming Zephyr Holdings is perfect. But we’re getting there, Mr. Jones. We’re getting there.”"

"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."

"“When someone asks for the ethics tape, we know they’ve already decided to invest. They just want some reassurance so they can feel good about it, too. That’s the thing you learn about values, Jones: they’re what people make up to justify what they did. Did you take business ethics in college?” “Yes.” “They teach you people’s behavior is guided by their values, right? That’s a load of crap. When you watch people like we do, you find out it’s the other way around. Look, I believe in what Alpha does, I really do. But do I worry about whether every little thing we do is ethical? No, because you can rationalize anything as ethical. You talk to a criminal—a tax dodger, a serial killer, a child abuser—and every one of them will justify their actions. They’ll explain to you, totally seriously, why they had to do what they did. Why they’re still good people. That’s the thing: when people talk about the importance of ethics, they never include themselves. The day anyone, anywhere, admits that they personally are unethical, I’ll start taking that whole issue seriously.”"

"Ninety-five percent of all jobs suck, Jones. That’s why people get paid to do them."

"She dabs at her eyes. “Jesus, you nearly killed me.” She takes a deep breath. “Whoo. Okay. Tell me how you justify buying a new pair of shoes.” “What?” “When there are starving people in Africa, what kind of person spends two hundred bucks on shoes? See, once you buy into that paradigm, it’s a bottomless pit. You can never feel good about yourself while there’s anybody in the world poor or hungry, which there always is, Jones, and has been since the dawn of time, so you feel guilty and hypocritical all the time. I’m consistent. I admit I don’t care. You want me to reassure you that Alpha is ethical, but I’m not going to do it, because ethics is bullshit. It’s the spin we put on our lives to justify what we do. I say, be big enough to live without rationalizations.”"

"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."

"There are two ways of looking at Senior Management. One is that it’s a tightly integrated team tirelessly pulling together in the service of whatever’s best for the company. The other is that it’s a dog pack of power-hungry egomaniacs who occasionally assist Zephyr as a side effect of their individual campaigns for wealth and status. Nobody believes the tightly knit team theory anymore. Once, a long time ago, it may have been true, but the instant a dog-pack person made it into Senior Management, it was all over. It’s like a fox getting into the chicken house; pretty soon there are only foxes and feathers. If Senior Management ever was ever made up of selfless individuals who put teamwork ahead of self-interest—and this is a big if—they were long ago torn to pieces."

"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.”"

"The Infrastructure Control manager is a short, muscular man with a dark beard. He is an oddity in Zephyr Holdings: a person who started on the floor and was promoted through hard work. This makes other managers uncomfortable. The idea that you can get ahead through sheer competence, and not politicking, backstabbing, fleeing impending disasters, and clambering on board imminent successes, undermines everything they know."

"Sydney feels an affinity with Human Resources. She likes the name, with its not-so-hidden implication that employees are an exploitable resource, like stock or real estate. And not a particularly valuable one, despite that old chestnut about employees being the company’s most important asset. Sydney knows the truth: give the company cash resources, give it strategic partnerships, give it inventory; give it anything but prickly, unreliable, idiosyncratic humans. People are the worst: you can’t stack them, or (easily) relocate them, and you can’t even just leave them alone to accumulate value. That’s why the company requires HR: a department to transform humans into resources."

"“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!”"

"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."

"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.”"

"Senior Management may have been incompetent; it may have been corrupt; it was certainly full of assholes—but they were their incompetent, corrupt assholes."

"There’s no requirement that jobs be meaningful, Jones. If there was, half the country would be unemployed."

"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."