Success Quote by Herbert V. Prochnow

"Company policy" is the corporate equivalent of a velvet rope: it looks orderly, even classy, while doing the blunt work of exclusion. Prochnow, a businessman who spent his life inside large institutions, isn’t mocking rules so much as the way rules get deployed as a conversation-stopper. The line’s sting comes from its inversion of legitimacy. Policy is supposed to signal forethought, consistency, and fairness; he reframes it as proof that no one can give you a reason that would survive daylight.

The specific intent is diagnostic. When an employee reaches for "policy", Prochnow implies, you’re no longer in the realm of judgment or persuasion. You’ve hit an internal script designed to protect the organization from accountability: if a decision is framed as pre-decided, the person delivering it can’t be negotiated with, and the person who authored it can’t be found. That’s the subtext: bureaucracy doesn’t just manage operations; it manages blame.

Context matters here. Prochnow’s era saw the rise of modern managerial capitalism, with standardized procedures replacing the older, messier world of discretionary customer service and paternalistic bosses. Policy became a mass-production tool for human interactions, making outcomes predictable but also making them cold. His quote captures the customer’s experience of that shift: the moment your problem becomes a case number, your appeal becomes irrelevant. It lands because we recognize the maneuver instantly: "policy" as a mask for "we don’t want to explain ourselves" - or worse, "we can’t."