Quotes About Workplace

I think the time has come when the American people understand that federal employees need to work an 8-hour day just like everybody else.

you have to hate anyone who can dismiss you, even if they're good to you, because you work for them and not with them.

The employer generally gets the employees he deserves.

Any place with a founder who brings a teddy bear to meetings," he writes, "is a step away from Jonestown.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs used to talk about a phenomenon called a "bozo explosion," by which a company's mediocre early hires rise up through the ranks and end up running departments. The bozos now must hire other people, and of course they prefer to hire bozos.

At Newsweek I worked for Jon Meacham, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Andrew Jackson. Here I work for a guy who brings a teddy bear to work and considers it a management innovation.

We can't just fix the workplace. We need to fix capitalism itself—and not just by making a few small tweaks at the edges. The whole system needs a major, fundamental reboot.

The company," he says, "doesn't need a reason to fire you. The company can do whatever it wants." A week later, on September 2, the Tuesday after the Labor Day weekend, Trotsky forwards me an email that Cranium has sent around to everyone in the marketing department. We're

Someone like me, with a D personality, is probably going to have trouble working with a C personality, because my personality type tends to be impatient, overbearing, and judgmental, and C personalities tend to be lazy nitwits.

If you pit a good employee against a bad system, the system will win almost every time" (Rummler and Brache, 1995, p. 75).

Skunking is spraying negative energy into the workplace, as skunks do when they're frightened.

The Harvard Business Review recently had an article called 'The Human Moment,' about how to make real contact with a person at work: … The fundamental thing you have to do is turn off your BlackBerry, close your laptop, end your daydream and pay full attention to the person.

But once you are in that field, emotional intelligence emerges as a much stronger predictor of who will be most successful, because it is how we handle ourselves in our relationships that determines how well we do once we are in a given job.

When I went on to write my next book, Working With Emotional Intelligence, I wanted to make a business case that the best performers were those people strong in these skills.

High performers, its research concludes, work for fifty-two minutes and then break for seventeen minutes.

Lawyers often face intense demands but have relatively little "decision latitude." Behavioral scientists use this term to describe the choices, and perceived choices, a person has. In a sense, it's another way of describing autonomy—and lawyers are glum and cranky because they don't have much of it.

frequent short breaks are more effective than occasional ones

Jobs that are demanding but don't offer autonomy burn us out.

Carrots & sticks are so last century. Drive says for 21st century work, we need to upgrade to autonomy, mastery & purpose.

researchers have found that extraversion has "no statistically significant relationship . . . with sales performance

The problem is that our corporate, government, and education cultures are configured for the 75 or 80 percent of people who are larks or third birds. Owls are like left-handers in a right-handed world—forced to use scissors and writing desks and catcher's mitts designed for others. How they respond is the final piece of the puzzle in divining the rhythms of the day.

If you're a boss, understand these two patterns and allow people to protect their peak

management—not merely how bosses treat us at work, but also how the broader ethos has leached into schools, families, and many other aspects of our lives.

According to the research, the most effective executives deployed humor twice as often as middle-of-the-pack managers.