we live in a world of excess: too many kinds of coffee, too many magazines, too many types of bread, too many digital recordings of Beethoven's Ninth, too many choices of rearview mirrors on the latest Renault. Sometimes you say to yourself: It's too much, it's all too much.

The more big business talks about something, the less of it there is. For example, it 'values' jobs just at the moment when they disappear; it revels in 'autonomy' when in fact you have to fill out forms in triplicate for the slightest trifle and ask the advice of six people to make insignificant decisions; it harps on 'ethics' while believing in absolutely nothing.

the middle manager is doomed to remain just that. Once an office rat, always an office rat.

Business and its logic of productivity have become the reference point in a society that thinks marketing every time it opens its mouth.

any effort at large-scale reorganization - that is, any project spanning more than two years and, more generally, anything that has not already been done - is inevitably doomed to failure.

although the typist has disappeared, her work has not: now you do it yourself. ... Since most companies have reduced the managerial ranks, there are fewer and fewer bosses, so you become a manger, his boss, and his secretary all rolled into one.

Remember that work is not a place for self-fulfillment. If it were, you would know it.