Okay, so Scott Adams is rich and famous and you're not. But at least you can share some of the credit for his success. After all, many of those utterly hilarious, completely ludicrous work situations that he lampoons in his roaring-success syndicated cartoon, Dilbert, come directly from your life.
“When I put my e-mail address on the strip, it really took off,” Adams says. “Now I get hundreds of messages a day and a lot of them are people sending me material, straight from their daily lives.”
No joke. Dilbert, the potato-shaped engineer with the glazed look who daily does battle with inane management fads, is nonfiction.
But he is not Scott Adams, even though Adams likes to warm up a crowd by asking plaintively: “Do I look like Dilbert to you?” (The crowd at the American Society for Training and Development conference, where we interviewed Adams, was divided on this issue. My opinion: except for the glasses and the bemused expression, not much resemblance.)
Adams is fond of saying that he is “37 percent Dilbert” but lately he admits, the Dogbert aspect of his personality is becoming more dominant. For example, his plan for world domination of the cartoon market is, he'll tell you with a satisfied smile, “right on target.” Dilbert now reaches over 30 million newspaper readers in nine countries, not to mention generating more than 30,000 downloads each month from his Internet sites (http://www.unitedmedia.com or keyword Dilbert on America On Line). Then there are the Dilbert dolls, Dilbert books, Dilbert calendars…And, Adams says, “interest in Hollywood is exceptionally high” for a big-screen version of the strip.
Not bad for something that began nearly a decade ago as “a doodle” that Adams amused himself with during boring meetings at Pacific Bell, where he worked for nine years as a “cubicle-bound gear-head.” Downsized (and happy about it) in 1995, Adams likes to tell audiences how management learned about his cartooning:
“I had gotten this unbelievably stupid memo from the vice president, so I worked it into my strip…at that time, I was only being run in a few newspapers, and I didn't figure anyone in management was reading it anyway. But the vice president's assistant was reading it, and thought this particular one was so hilarious, she copied it and passed it around at a staff meeting…I didn't get fired, but they assigned me to work on ISDN for the rest of the year.”
Adams took his revenge, as usual, in the comic strip. When you meet this unassuming, soft-spoken guy, who can patiently sign hundreds of books for his admirers and keep smiling, it's hard to reconcile his exterior with the razor-sharp wit that skewers fools, fads, and critics. But wait a minute—there must be a reason he sketches Dog-bert above his signature…
“Yes,” Adams admits, “the Dogbert part of my ego is starting to assert itself. Dogbert is like you would be if you didn't care what people thought of you and could say anything you wanted to. He answers my complaint mail for me. And people are actually eager to be attacked by him.”
Q Cartoonists get complaint mail?
A Oh, sure. Everybody has one thing that they think is not funny Recently the janitor got killed in one strip and I got this enraged e-mail saying, “So! You think it's okay for the professional staff to kill the blue collar staff…!”
Q And you said…?
A I said, “Yeah, you have a problem with that?” Seriously, that's the great thing about being your own boss. Most of us are bound by the thought that we have to act the way people expect us to, but you really don't have to do that! It's very liberating when you realize it. Now when people write and say they don't like the strip, I write back and say “drop dead.” It's funny; they feel free to insult me and I’m supposed to say, “Oh, sorry how can I make it better?” But as soon as you flagrantly ignore the rules, there's nothing to stop you.
Wait, maybe you shouldn't print that—you wouldn't want project managers running amok…
Q You say that with a diabolical grin. Speaking of project managers, I couldn't find Dilbert in our member database. Does he belong to PMI?
A No, he's not a project manager, he's just a lowly team member. I was a project manager for a while—I talk about some of those experiences in my book (The Dilbert Principle, HarperBusiness, 1996. See sidebar, next page.)
Q Your chapter on projects had our office in stitches. And our readers love Dilbert…even though engineers are sometimes considered a rather humorless bunch. What do you make of that?
A Sometimes humor is just a process of skewering people that other people don't like…once I learned that, I started skewering groups like Marketing and Management, and the strip really took off. Now I try to be less clever and more mean. But really, all I do is make fun of stupid people—and I’m one of them—we're all stupid about 99 percent of the time.
Q A lot of your cartoons revolve around projects. Is there something inherently hilarious about project management?
A Well, yeah! Of course. The project manager's job—trying to get people to get work done when they want to be doing something else and you don't have any authority at all—is a ridiculous position to be in. That's why it's always been the maxim that becoming a project manager meant death for an engineer. But you can figure out a way to make projects work for you. The best way to deal with it, I’ve found, is to get on multiple projects. That way you can always tell anyone who tries to give you work on their project that you're busy with work on the other ones. Engineers love to avoid responsibility and being a project manager is a great way to do that.
You can take the engineer out of the cubicle, but…
Although he's a cartoonist now, recovering “pseudo-engineer” Scott Adams still can't help believing that everything can be expressed as a formula. During his keynote address at the September ASTD conference in Cincinnati he shared his equation for humor with the audience:
“Humor has six basic dimensions: cute, recognizable, mean, bizarre, naughty, clever.” (He even had overheads of this.)
“Something isn't funny unless it uses at least two of these dimensions. Cute and recognizable is like Mickey Mouse. I tend to lean more toward combinations of the recognizable with the mean, naughty and clever. If you can work in three dimensions, you're really cooking.
“…and some words are just funnier than others. Grab is funnier than pick up. Poke is funnier than hit. But I haven't been able to get a clear reading on squash and zucchini. People split at about 50-50 on those two words.”
Q Fortune and the Wall Street Journal have both written about project management recently, saying it's the career of the decade, the wave of the future. What do you think?
A I think the ultimate career is not having a boss and not having employees. As soon as you add an employee there's that sense of “you're ripping me off” on both sides. It changes everything. I’ll eventually have to have an employee, I guess, and I’ll be a bad manager…if you could see yourself and look at the things you do as a manager, then everybody would be a good one. Even managers who laugh at Dilbert aren't usually able to see themselves in it.
Q Wasn't it Deming who said, about 30 years ago, “Management is the problem”? Nothing has changed, has it?
A Any problem a manager creates seems magnified…if you take the big view, as a species we manage pretty well, but that's because the 1 percent of the time we're brilliant happens at different times for all of us, so it evens out. But it's hard to keep that view in mind when you're working late because some bonehead decided they wanted some perfectly useless report.
Q I liked the story you told in your keynote address this morning, about your first project in the banking industry.
A We didn't call that project management, but it was a project and I guess we were a team. They gave the two of us a windowless office off the parking garage and told us to create a computer system for the branches, but no one knew who we were or what we were doing and we had no information.
A Cubicle's-Eye View of Project Management
From The Dilbert Principle, Chapter 19, “Projects”:
This chapter is for the benefit of those of you who are considering being on a project. Executive summary: RUN AWAY!! RUN AWAY!!
Management is generally forced to conscript a Team Leader based on these qualifications:
1. Candidate must know how to make viewgraphs.
2. Candidate must be a carbon-based lifeform.
No project can succeed without management support. The best kind of management support is the kind in which management doesn't find out about the project until it's a market success.
The scheduling phase of the project involves asking people how long it will take them to do the work. It usually goes like this:
Project leader: How long will it take to select a vendor?
Team member: Between a day and a year.
Project leader: You need to be more specific.
Team member: Okay, three years.
Project leader: Three years is longer than a year.
Team member: Fine, you're the expert, you pick the vendor.
…Sophisticated project management software…collects the lies and guesses of the project team and organizes them into instantly outdated charts that are too boring to look at closely. This is called “planning.”
When we'd call someone up and try to get some data, they'd say “What was your name again? And you're doing what?” Eventually we turned in this plan for the system, which never worked right. We had a goal, which was the stated intent of the project…but the real intent was to drive us crazy.
…And then, at Pacific Bell, one time they came to us and said, “We need to build a lab, because the customers need to be able to test the products.” Well, we all jumped on it and came to find out later, after we'd spent all this time and money, that it was one customer who mentioned it once. By the time the lab was ready he'd solved his problem some other way. The whole thing was based on a rumor of customers.
But the business world is like that. After I got my MBA, I spent a long time writing business cases to prove what somebody else had already decided. It was ironic. I went back to school to learn to use numbers to get at the truth—and then spent my days using numbers to obscure the truth. That can give you a sick feeling at the end of the day.
Q A lot of engineers and project managers are addressing that conflict by becoming contract workers. Will Dilbert go out on his own?
A Dilbert is like a ship in a bottle…he goes where the current takes him. So I can't really say right now. But so many people are becoming self-employed…we'll see what happens with him during the next year.
Q The transcendental garbage man is a great character. Is this someone you actually know?
A No. I just like characters who are opposites. Like Dogbert—dogs are supposed to be the least powerful, but he's going to enslave humanity. I like the notion, with the garbage man, that if he's smarter than you—and doing something you wouldn't do—then who is right?
Q This interview will appear in an issue that focuses on teams. Give us your wisdom on this: do teams really ever get anything done?
A Oh, sure. There's the infighting, the bickering, the sabotaging coworkers to get more resources for yourself…Teams are a whirlwind of activity.
Q Project managers like to joke that their job is like herding cats. Do you use your project management skills in cartooning? I know you have a team of cats…
A Well, the cats are more highly skilled than I am, so actually there's not much project management in being a cartoonist. It's mainly time management. I have an amazingly organized life. (Although the cats resist being organized.) But cartooning is not project-based; there's no end to my work. Except, I suppose, you could think of speaking engagements as projects. They have a beginning, a middle and an end; if you look at it that way, I have about 30 projects going at any given time. And a book is also a project.
Q You've been profiled in just about every major magazine lately and the crowd at the ASTD breakfast went wild when you were introduced this morning. From quiet engineering type in a cubicle to media superstar—that's quite a transition. How are you holding up?
A I was born for it. There was never a time that I didn't know I was going to be famous…if you look at people who are getting Oscars, they knew it at birth. At six they were out building theaters in the garage. Frankly, I’m just surprised it took me so long. I always knew I was going to be famous, I just didn't know for what…and I have to admit, when I got to be about 30, I’d say to myself: “This is weird. I know I’m going to be famous, but there don't seem to be any external signs of it so far…” Then I realized that being famous is one thing that you can make happen if you really want it.
Q How do you explain the strip's incredible popularity?
A A cartoonist is like the man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz…just pointing out the obvious in a way that makes people notice it. Sometimes it weird to realize how much power you gain from doing that. There's actually a school in Chicago that is using The Dilbert Principle in some high-level MBA classes—which is shocking, when you think about it.
Q So, my final question—a burning one for our readership—what software does Dilbert have on that machine?
A Oh, he's in a multiplatform environment, of course, so he has one of everything. Eat your heart out.