Customer Reviews

The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle's-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads & Other Workplace Afflictions

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I've worked as an engineer or technician, both for big companies and small. Before Dilbert, in all but the most restrictive environments, a small office underground poked the same kind of fun at management. Some offices even have their own cartoonists. A mega-sized company in Texas had a talented, cartoon artist, who did satirical office cartoons, with great caricature likenesses. He signed his work "The Phantom", and because I think even management knew who he was, he stayed restrained enough to keep it funny, but not too insulting. One possible exception, was a cartoon that mimicked the classic road gang movie, "Cool Hand Luke". He depicted an office corridor which as management walked by each office, they would say "Still shaking that work order there, boss". It did not go over too well with management.

The Dilbert Principle is loosely based on the long discussed phenomena, called the "Peter Principle". Which I always thought means the biggest "prick" rises the highest. Usually it's the most unqualified as well. In this age we pay CEO's millions in salary, and then give them massive stock options. In return, they bankrupt the company with shady accounting practices, and sometimes, outright theft. You have to wonder if the term "business ethics" is an oxymoron. It's good that most offices have people like Dilbert, and we all have artists like Scott Adams. The humor allows many of us to survive the droll, office existence day after day. The unrewarding existence, of working in a system where incompetents profit, often on our good works.

Prior to Dilbert, I may have considered myself unique, or just unlucky to be employed by some of these bozo's in suit and tie. I've been through the improvement meetings, sensitivity, and those focus groups. The "one on one" carpet sessions with my boss, which accomplished nothing, except to try my patience, and then waste my time. Still, management needs to feel they do something, and if it can't make a new report to show their own boss this week, it may be time to try out the latest management fad. Adams collection of cartoons, groups these into common categories of management tactics. If you look hard enough, you may even find a cartoon, that help you avoid experiencing the same Hell in your own office. It's too bad the managers don't seem to read these books, or if they do, they don't seem to be telling.

Perhaps the most important thing found in The Dilbert Principle, is that it gives some of us a better understanding of what's really going on. Unless you're fairly astute, you will occasionally find yourself buying into a lot of management disinformation. Information, that could clue you into a "downsizing", a company sale, management change, or other "issues", that may give you reason to brush up the old resume. At the very least, if gives you a chance to know what's probably going on behind the scenes, and decide how to best keep your own house.

Another thing that is uncanny about Scott Adams, is his depiction of the characters. It seemed like, the company I worked for in Texas, was chock full of those little balding management guys. Middle managers with overly short wide ties, and always carrying a cup of coffee in their right hand, as they walked about. They'd ask us about what we were doing, and when we told them they'd look confused, say something cleverly non-committal, and move on. It used to be a competition to see who could confuse them first, and move them on to the next persons office or cubicle.

If there's a mascot for Internet users, it's the nerdy engineer Dilbert from Scott Adams' comic strip of the same name. No other character in the mass media combines the feelings of technological superiority and wage-slave hopelessness present in the lives of most computer users. But the play of computer users versus management is only part of Adams' comic ouevre; his hilarious take on everyday blue-collar workers touches not only on computer use in companies, but the combined forces of Total Quality Management, endless meetings, doughnuts, cubicles, business plans, and all the other aspects of working in a modern office. Although most of Adams' strips play on the plight of the nameless cubicle worker against an uncaring and oblivious management, he also covers the flip side of work where managers are unable to motivate employees beyond using the office LAN for Doom and the fine art of making sleep look like work. Given all of this familiarity with business, and the increasing popularity of business books, it makes sense that Adams' most recent book, The Dilbert Principle isn't a collection of Dilbert strips but a incisive look at the frailty and foibles of self-help management books under the guise of being one itself.

Business books were overdue to move from the bestseller list to the parody shelf. What was once simply just a few "feel-good"self-help psychology books for managers like Stephen R.Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Kenneth Blanchard's The One Minute Manager is now a plague, including books like The Management Secrets of Attila the Hun and The Star Trek Guide to Management. What these books spend so many words doing that Adams deconstructs so brilliantly is to take what is common sense to anybody else and grafting the buzz words of business schools and management training on it. Take, for example, this wonderful bit of normal business communication that might have come straight from Management 101:

"Perform world-class product development, financial analysis, and feet services using empowered team dynamics in a Total Quality paradigm until we become the industry leader.

Take out the double-speak, and what you have is a mission statement that says:

"Do the best work to provide the best product with the best people until we become the best in our field."

Unfortunately, the first statement probably took ten people who get paid in the high five figures (if not more) at least three days at an exclusive resort in Florida to write. Even more than mission statements such as this, business double-speak of the nineties has centered around terms such as "downsizing" and "re-engineering". By putting a different spin on the timeless tradition of firing and re-organization, today's companies act more like politicians than producers.

Ninety-five percent of Adams book is examples such as this, cartoons illustrating the examples, and email from Dilbert readers telling how their companies have fallen into the Dilbert Zone. All of this is great reading, although sometimes disconcerting when you see your own company being portrayed. The last five percent of The Dilbert Principle is Scott Adams' own philosophy for managers. He says, in the introduction to unveiling his company model OA5 (standing for "Out at Five O'Clock"), that:

"In this chapter you will find a variety of untested suggestions from an author who has never successfully managed anything but his cats. (And now that I think of it, I haven't seen the grey one for two days.) ... I doubt that anything you read here will improve your life, but I'm fairly confident that it won't hurt you either, and that's better than a lot of things you're doing now."

Although humble, his suggestions have much merit because they return the business of work to common sense. When a company remembers, as Adams suggests, that it has three main reasons for being (its customers, its employees, and its stockholders), and treats all three fairly, then the rest will fall into place. If all the management consultants and business book authors condensed their theories into brief summaries such as this, it would be tough to charge [amt]an hour and [amt] per book for it. Which means that there will always be consultants and treatises for the clueless, and an endless supply of material for Adams' cartoon.

My work involves helping company leaders identify the causes of "stalled" thinking in the organization. What impresses me about this book is how many of the causes Scott Adams has identified. The man is clearly a great observer of organizations. His crusade against "stalled" thinking (especially by the leaders) also means that others with keen insights send him their observations, as well. Future historians of the American corporation would do better to start with Scott Adams than most of the organizational theory and practice business books that have been written. His humor is excellent, because he is unerring in picking the right balloon to prick. As a management consultant, I regularly reread his chapter on management consultants to be sure that I am not behaving like the ones he describes. Keep these wonderful books and comic strips coming! Be sure to post the strips where they will get the most attention. Maybe you will help someone wake up in your leadership!

I used to work for my native country's Tax Collection Authority and thought that all the management antics and sheer madness I witnessed -and many times I participated in- were exclusive to my organisation because it was a) a government office, and b) in a developing country. After three years I just couldn't take any more and left to do my PhD in the UK studying Information Technologies in bureaucratic organisations. I started reading Max Weber's classic writings on bureaucracy and some other scholarly works on the same topic, that drew from a number of theories ranging from rationality to institutional theory and Foucault on power and authority, which I found quite unconvincing. Then I came across "the Dilbert principle" in a second hand shop, bought it and couldn't put it down for three consecutive days. When I was done I realised that the management follies I experienced in my country were in fact the rule in most companies in the USA -and perhaps in the western world. I didn't know whether to laugh out loud or to cry, because this supposedly humorous book questions the very underlying assumptions of mainstream organisational theories (e.g., rational choice theory) using empirical evidence that is practically impossible to neglect, as most of us people who have worked can confirm. I'm delighted I found this book early in my PhD.

This book is an amusing look at modern business practices and what's wrong with them. Adams takes us through a short history of business in the 1990s, from down-sizing to right-sizing, from re-engineering to Total Quality Management. His descriptions, based on his own job titles and tasks, of how the business world has changed is quite revealing. In the not-so-long-ago good-old-days, people could easily get lost in the bureaucracy of a large company doing time wasting jobs that produced nothing of value for the company. As things got tighter, in poorly run companies, the rats who could swim did just that, leaving more and more work to be done by people who were, on average, less and less capable. And the least capable, as well all know, were promoted to management, where they wouldn't be in the way of real work.

In the last part of the book, Adams has a few suggestions as an engineer/cartoonist about ideal company management. He introduces the notion of the OA5 company, or Out At Five. He suggests that managers maximize efficiency by scheduling meetings only in the afternoons, and late in the afternoons, so that the meetings don't get in the way of real work. That way, the work gets done despite the meeting, so everyone can get out at 5, which keeps up morale and energy. Besides, if a meeting is scheduled for 4-5 and everyone wants to get Out At Five, then the interminable chatterers who hog the floor at meetings may keep their traps shut for once so that they too, can go home on time. Adams argues that the most important task for a manager is to make sure that everyone in the department is a team player, and that people who don't work well or get along well with others should be dismissed. That way, the others can get more work done and get Out At Five. I've never studied business management and I don't think Adams has formally either, but these ideas sure sound as good as anything else I've heard on the topic. In any case, we'll have to wait for the prototype to be built before we can see how the ideas actually work in practice.

subject says it all- just get it and you will laugh your hiney off. Plently of Dilbert cartoon panels disbursed throughout. Published in 1996 but absolutely timeless and just as applicable today as ever; probably always will be.

I bow to the man (Scott Adams). This book is frighteningly accurate in the way it profiles modern software-related companies. For me it acts as a bible of every-day pitfalls to watch out for. When things are rotten don't expect any big warning signs saying "ROTTEN-ROTTEN BEWARE".
No, it's in the everyday working life that you see the signs of decay, and this book has them all.

While the outrageous antics of the characters in the Dilbert comic strip accurately represents what happens in some companies, one must not fall victim to the fallacy of self-selection. There are businesses who treat their employees as valuable assets. Some companies develop and execute sound business plans and are places where communication is open, honest and without retribution. Therefore, the problems recounted in the Dilbert strip are not universal. The lucky people at these companies still deserve a few good yuks, and they no doubt laugh as hard as the rest of us at what they see in Dilbert. However, the most benefit accrues to those toiling at the dysfunctional companies, where humor is needed to survive the day. Laughter, whether it be joyous or gallows, has a very cathartic effect on us, serving to help us cope with the most difficult of circumstances.
This is without question the most humorous book chronicling the (mis)adventures of Dilbert, our favorite engineer. Adams generates a great deal of sweet medicine that helps make the sour stuff go down easier. Since even the most bizarre circumstances are not unique, workers everywhere will recognize some aspects of their particular situation.
Adams is a genius at capturing and lampooning the foibles of many who manage our companies. There can be no higher compliment than the fact that the Dilbert web site is one of the most blocked sites in the business world. Fortunately, the truth speaks with a louder, more effective voice than incompetent managers, and in the end they will only be remembered in cartoons.

This book changed my life forever (and also Scott Adam's life, I supose, because it selled very well). I was a manager in LOJAS AMERICANAS, one of the largest retail trade companies in Brazil. There was no cublicle there, because we worked in the store's floor, but I sensed something very wrong was going on with my life. I was 28 years-old at the time and I saw consultants making hell of our lives, managers that didn't even know what was "Windows", directors trying to give inspiring speechs to absurdly low-paid employees... Someday, I bought this book. UAU ! It was everything there ! THat was the hell and ridiculous I was living, line-by-line, word-by-word ! I'm not a irresponsible man, but I was fired a little time after reading the book, and the book gave me the conscious that stopping working for that company could be the salvation of my life. And it was. Now I work almost for myself, in a dignified way, with a decent salary. Thanks, Scott.

Over the past decade, management books have emerged from academic libraries, and now compete for poll position in the local airport bookstore. Despite this, many are written in unreadable jargon, and tackle the identical banalities, namely the ever-increasing rate of change, the difference between leadership and management, and people, your greatest asset.

For this reason, it is a pleasant surprise to read that Dilbert has apparently become the number one business book of all times.

Some people see this as a bad thing. As management guru Gary Hamel says: "Dilbert is cynical about management. Never has there been so much cynicism." Hamel is the strategist's strategist. His book Competing for the Future is about the ever-increasing rate of change, the difference between leadership and management, and people, your greatest asset. To the high priests of strategic thinking, such cynicism is sacrilege.

But some of us enjoy a good laugh, and a well-drawn mental picture has the impact of a thousand management words. According to Asams we are all idiots, we are just idiots about different things at different times. Big corporations encourage idiocy to thrive. Adams is at his best when using humor to show up these weaknesses.