World Famous Comics: The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle's-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads & Other Workplace Afflictions
The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle's-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads & Other Workplace Afflictions
By: Scott Adams Publisher: Collins Business Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Collins Business Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 352 Publication Date: June 04, 1997 Release Date: April 24, 1997
Product Description: The Dilbert Principle: The most ineffective workers will be systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage -- management.
Since 1989, Scott Adams has been illustrating this principle each day, lampooning the corporate world in Dilbert, his enormously popular comic strip. In the potato-shaped, abuse-absorbing Dilbert, he has given voice to the millions of Americans buffeted by the many adversities of the workplace.
He has now taken the next step, attacking corporate culture head-on in this insanely insightful management book. Packed with 400 Dilbert cartoons, the book takes a look at corporate America in all its glorious lunacy, exploring its zeitgeist of ever-changing management fads, overbearing egos, management incompetence, bottomless bureaucracies, petrifying performance reviews, information traffic jams and more. With sharp eyes, and an even sharper wit, Adams exposes and skewers the bizarre absurdities of everyday corporate life. Readers will be convinced that he must be spying on their bosses, The Dilbert Principle rings so true!
Amazon.com Review: You loved the comic strip; now read the business advice.
Or should that be anti-business advice? Scott Adams provides the hapless victim of re-engineering, rightsizing and Total Quality Management some strategies for fighting back, er, coping. Forced to work long hours, with no hope of a raise? Adams offers tips on maintaining parity in compensation. Along the way, Adams explains what ISO 9000 really is and assesses the irresistibility of female engineers.
The breath-taking cynicism of the strip should prepare readers for the author's no-holds-barred attack on management fads, large organizations, pointless bureaucracy and sadistic rule-makers who glory in control of office supplies. Readers of the on-line Dilbert Newsletter are familiar with the kind of e-mail Adams receives from his readers -- and may even have sent a few of those missives themselves. Along with illustrative strips, e-mail messages provide excruciating examples of corporate behavior which compel the reader to agree with Adams when he insists that "People are idiots".
The final chapter offers a model for would-be successful businesses to follow: the OA5 model. It's introduced with little fanfare, no outrageous promises and just the right amount of self-deprecation.
Don't laugh, this is serious! Don't be ridiculous, management is not a subject for a 'science', that's crap. But it is a serious subject and it deserves to be be analyzed better than most 'consultants' do. (I admit that consultants and investment bankers are the black sheep in my personal arsenal of values.)
Thinking hard, at times, about the subject, it occurs to me, that nobody understood 'management' better than Scott Adams in his first book on the Dilbert Principle. If I had to list the required reading on management (that is if you were interested in that), I would be fairly simple with a list of 3: apart from Dilbert, all you need is Peter Drucker, who invented this 'science' (these Austrians are everywhere, but this one is an acceptable version), and Tom Peters, who turned Drucker into pulp non-fiction with In Search of Excellence and the sequels.
My most intensive encounter with Dilbert happened in upstate New York in 1996. I participated in a 4 weeks management course of Columbia University in Harriman, their summer resort. It was gorgeous. Except, I broke a foot during the first week, during football, what you guys erroneously call soccer. After that, I spent most of my free time in my room or the terrace, reading Dilbert, laughing my head off, eating and drinking too much, while my peers explored the neighborhood, which was hard for me with my heavy plaster cast. I can say that I learned plenty during that month, mostly from Adams.
Satire that will strike a bit close to white-collar managers The "Peter Principle" says that competent people are promoted until they reach a job they can't handle, where they stop. As a result, we are surrounded by once-competent but now-incompetent people (including ourselves). The Dilbert Principle provides a less optimistic view of organizations: we promote incompetent people to get them away from where the real work is done. As a result, we are ruled by incompetent managers, who continue to be promoted, and who earn large salaries and stock options. Competent people at the bottom have to figure out a way to make the organization work, despite management.
This book gives us a bunch of Scott Adams' "Dilbert Cartoons," stories, short essays, and emails from fans, organized into a bunch of chapters around "Business Communication," "Performance Reviews," and "Swearing." It's funny, but choppy.
Lurking behind all the fun is a serious critique of modern business management. Adams draws this out in a brief conclusion, where he (seriously) lays out how he'd run a company. There is Much To Be Learned here.
Historians of the future will be shocked by it all.
The Real Thing What can I say? Scott Adams has been revealing the "Real-Life-In-The-Office" for a long time and with great success. I have been reading his daily comics (in Canada) religiously. This book covers --and uncovers--many harsh and unpleasant facts about the wild-and-crazy world of the office business wonderfully well.
Current financial crisis explained This is one of the books that I reread from time to time to remind myself of its insights, because they are important. In fact, recent events have made this book more topical than I'd like. You can probably skip the articles by the usual financial pundits about why the US banking system has tanked. Scott Adams' model explains the incompetence that permeates so many corporations in simple and plausible terms. His conclusions appear quite applicable to what is currently going on.
How to survive in corporate industry When first Dilbert comics started to appear on newspapers I didn't understand them, they were probably only comics I didn't read. After I started to work in IT industry, Dilbert is the only comics I read.
And the book is even better, it's pretty hard to understand these comics without explanation from Scott Adams.
These comics feel so absurd, but even more absurd is how often you can find yourself in Dilbert-like situations in IT industry.
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