It's So Funny, It Hurts

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It's So Funny, It Hurts

Dilbert's creator takes aim at reengineering, downsizing, team projects, and other workplace phenomena in the age of promotional demotions

By Peter Krass
Issue date: May 27, 1996

The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle's Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads & Other Workplace Afflictions, By Scott Adams, (HarperBusiness, New York, 1996, 336 pages, $20).

I used to wonder whether IS managers felt guilty for building the computer systems that replaced so many laid-off workers during the past few years. But I quickly realized that most IS people I know have themselves been "outsourced" and "reengineered" out of a job or two.

In a world gone so obviously mad, thank god for "Dilbert." This comic strip, which appears in more than 1,000 newspapers in nearly 30 countries, has for the past seven years been one of the few voices telling the truth about the "new" workplace. Arrogant consultants, ignorant managers, psychopathic salespeople, and geeky engineers all have had their hot-air balloons punctured by the razor-sharp pen of Dilbert's creator, Scott Adams.

Demoted To Manager
Now comes Adams' eighth Dilbert book, a collection of loosely related essays titled The Dilbert Principle. The title spoofs the Peter Principle, a nugget of 1970s wisdom: People are promoted to their maximum level of incompetence.

The Dilbert Principle, by contrast, postulates that "the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management." That's progress, folks.

The Dilbert Principle in action, Adams explains, has brought us computer equipment that doesn't work, mission statements, change committees, time-wasting teams of all sorts, downsizing, massive business reengineering projects, consultant-speak, and other manifestations of a doomed existence. Anything, that is, but productive, creative work.

Of course, the best parts of the book are the wonderful "Dilbert" comic strips with which Adams laces his essays. Like the raspberry jam
in a Sacher torte, they add pleasure to pleasure. I freely admit I read them first. Here's my favorite: Ratbert, a cheerful talking rat who has been hired as an intern at Dilbert's company, pipes up at a meeting: "Let's form multidisciplinary task forces to reengineer our core processes until we're a world-class organization!" "Sounds good," replies the boss, "Go do it." At which point, Ratbert slips away with, "I'm more of an idea rat."

Adams gets most of his ideas from reader E-mail, as many as 1,000 mes sages a day, and he includes quite a few of these in the book. Though few are as funny as Adams' own writing, I did enjoy the one about the IS director who bought his company's PCs one at a time on his personal credit card to collect the frequent-flyer miles. Whatever tropical resort he ended up flying to, I hope he got a really painful sunburn.

The bulk of the book was written from the premise that "we're all idiots," Adams says. "I'm sure there are other plausible explanations for why business seems so absurd," he adds, "but I can't think of any." After reading his chapters on humiliation (techniques for keeping employees from "too much self-esteem to be productive"), pretending to work ("your ticket to freedom"), reengineering ("like performing an appendectomy on yourself ... It hurts quite a bit, you might not know exactly how to do it, and there's a good chance you won't survive it"), and "engineers, scientists, programmers, and other odd people," I couldn't think of any other explanations, either.

If you haven't yet discovered Dilbert, this book is a good place to start. If you're already a fan, it makes a fine guide for anyone planning to form a Dilbert Principle Committee at his or her company. For your first project, I suggest a multidisciplinary study of team approaches to rapid technology change implementations with world-class quality on a reengineered time frame.

You want me to lead the study? Sorry, I'm more of an idea rat.

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