Customer Reviews

The Joy of Work: Dilbert's Guide to Finding Happiness at the Expense of Your Co-Workers

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I do not read Dilbert books for the humor, that part is simply a plus. I read them because of the serious business strategies in them.

I highly recommend this book for any low level office workers. Having personally done most of the things in this book, I can say the "tricks" are for real. If you are one of those employees who gets your work done in 2 hours when your boss allotted you 40, then what are you going to do with the other 38 hours?

The book follows the flow of Serious, Joking, Serious. It starts with paradigm-shifting philosophy, then it morphs into humor and finally it ends with a nice section on "how humor works". Nicely Done.

This is one of the first Dilbert books I have read. I enjoyed the book and thought it was outright hilarious. It is a nice easy read to relax and you will be laughing out loud. I usually do not laugh out loud when I am reading books, but this book did it for me.

There were two sections of the book that stood out to me. I especially liked the section on office pranks written in by readers of Dilbert to Scott Adams. Also particularly amusing is the instance where Adams pretends to be a consultant at Logitech. Read the book to see what happens. Not too surprising, but funny.

Whether you are a longtime Dilbert fan or a newcomer to the Dilbert series, I would recommend this book for a quick and funny read. I have also read The Dilbert Principle, but I found this book much funnier.

Thsis book was funny and true. Most of the people who criticized the second section probably didn't stop to think that Adams' humor formula actually works.

This book is probably the funniest thing you will read in a long, long time. It is absolutely, incredibly, painfully funny, and it has some real tips thrown in for good measure. Any one who calls themselves a Dilbert Fan and/or has any sense of humor should get this book. As a DNRC member and a fan who has all Scott Adams' books, I can truly recommend this as one of his best to date.

Scott Adams fourth Dilbert hardback book is not his best (the Dilbert Principle wins that one hands down). There are some very funny stories in the book, I was really howling at times. But there are times his humor misses the mark, such as his answer to Norman Solomon's anti-Dilbert book, which I thought came off as mean-spirited. Unfortunately, there are more misses than hits in this book.

Scott Adams has brought joy in the workplace over the past five years with his dead-on humor about the corporate business world. It has also brought him many financial opportunities, of which he has taken advantage. I say more power to him, I'd do the same. But I'm starting to wonder whether he should stop writing these full-length books and instead create some more comic books with strips that are outside of those that are published in papers. He's done this before and I think that is where he can entertain more people in the future.

Clearly written during the dot-com boom, this book is nevertheless enjoyable for its laugh-out-loud humor. It's written tongue-in-cheek as a guide to enjoy work - you're there most of the time, might as well have fun. Being devious is key. Some of the practical "jokes" that readers have sent to Scott Adams border more on cruelty than humor, but hey, you wouldn't take this advice seriously anyway. Reading it in the dot-bomb era is fun, too, as it shows the "take this job and shove it" attitude that the stock option days led to.

The latter part of the book is Scott Adams' musings on creativity and humor. He tries to keep the same tonality as in the rest of the book, but you can tell he's a bit more thoughtful about this. It, too, is a good read, albeit different than the first part of the book.

Scott Adams captures the high-tech industry of the 90s at its funniest and worst! Dilbert portrays real-life situations that all "cubicle-dwellers" have encountered at one point of time or another. Most of these encounters are often unpleasant, but terribly funny under the witty pen of Scott Adams.

This work is mostly original work and not a collection of the syndicated Dilbert cartoon strips.

While some cartoonists are simply entertaining, others are a combination of social satirist and philosopher. The really good ones seem to be able to capture a page of meaning in a few captioned drawings. Scott Adams is one of the best at this and his area of proficiency is the modern corporate world where managers and their sniveling minions are the particular target of his wrathful humor. His observations are so treasured by those who toil mightily to traipse through the drivel that the Dilbert web site is one of those most commonly blocked by the managers of corporate web access.
This is sad but understandable. Like all good cartoonists, Adams makes us laugh at our problems, and some of them are caused by those who order the blocking. While this book is not as good as the original, even the weakest parts will make you smile as you recognize some aspects of the problems that you face in your job. It is amazing how Adams can sketch three captions and use thirty words or less to write pages of commentary on how things are going wrong at work.
The content in the book is a mixture of messages from readers, previous Dilbert cartoons and satiric commentary by Adams. While some of the get-even gags in the messages are great, there are some that cross the line, which make you wonder if they were really submitted in good faith.
I enjoyed the book, finding it illuminating, and one more affirmation of the role of satire in our world. Without it, our world would be much less interesting and much more difficult. Of course, that would not be a problem if there were not so many situations that generate it.

Dilbert follows an established line of business cynics. Parkinson wrote that "work expands to fill the time available". Peter wrote "Managers in an organization rise until they reach their level of incompetence". And Robert Townsend, ex CEO of Avis, wrote that "consultants borrow your watch to tell you the time".

Adams is aware of this and in his book, The Dilbert Principle, he refers to the Peter Principle as "those Golden Years when you had a boss who was once good at something".

If Dilbert is not the first, he is the best. Unlike the others, he has achieved mass circulation and adorns t-shirts, coffee mugs and cubicle walls.

The key to success, says Adams, is segmentation. "If you can sell enough units to the Stupid Rich... then you can lower your prices and sell to the Stupid Poor, (which is) where the real volume is."

The Dilbert principle states that people are idiots. We are just idiots about different things at different times. "No matter how smart you are, you spend much of your day being an idiot." Big corporations encourage idiocy to thrive. They reward the symptoms of competence, above competence itself.

Scott Adams himself had a brief foray as the super consultant, Ray Mebert. He dressed up, put on a wig (never forget the emotional intelligence of good hair), and helped a group of executives at an international company create "the longest, most useless, buzzword-heavy mission statement on earth". It was when they were putting it to music (since "there is a wealth of evidence that people can remember words more easily if they are put to music"), that he finally came clean.

With the advent of Mebert, we are looking at a new age in consulting. One day we will look back to the Golden Days when consultants borrowed your watch and at least told you the time. The new Mebert consultants will take your watch and at most will ask you to describe it.

Although at times I thought I had slipped into a parallel universe where Dave Barry draws Dilbert cartoons, (and would that be a bad thing?) the first part of the book is very very funny. It also continues to show how Mr. Adams really does know the dangers and humor that are an integral part of the modern corporate environment. Suddenly, (maybe to make the whole thing book length) the book swerves to cover territory like "How to be funny." Proving a time honored truism, "The analysis of humor is usually not funny." Supposedly the goal is to teach someone how to add humor to the work environment but that would be like my posting of a Dilbert cartoon on my wall making me a cartoonist. And the chapter on handling criticism is only there to give Mr. Adams to attack a book that no one I know gave any credibility to begin with. It does come across as mean and petty, but mostly just as unnecessary.