Managers play favorites based on personalities versus results, managers love flashy shining things versus content or substance, managers share personal information of their employees with the employee's peers, managers are often threaten by employees who know more than they do, and managers often do not have the background and experience to perform their roles and are often very defensive as a result.
Culturally, Microsoft has a challenge of too much in fighting, too many people worried about show casing sales type slides in PowerPoint versus the content shared being real or providing value to the company because managers do not understand what they should be looking at, no emphasis on results and more about marketing (mostly vaporware), too many arguments of a word or term such as one that remembered "what is a application versus a platform?" (I thought Microsoft should have known this by now); and the culture is one that no one can truly advance without stepping on others as a regular practice and declaring their work as your work.
Politically - this environment is the most politically charged environment that I have worked in. Of course there is politics in every company and very bad people in every company. However, not at this magnitude. Even Human Resources has told me in the past they see the bad behaviors and are working on it. So, I waited 8 years and still no improvements. Things have simply became worse than ever.
