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Scott Adams. The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle's-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads and Other Workplace Afflictions. New York: Harper Business, 1996, 336 pages, $22.00. Reviewed by Gary B. Brumback, Palm Coast, FL.
This is a most unusual book to be reviewed here. It's a thick, cathartic comic book for people who have ever been upset with their employers. It's written and drawn by the creator of Dilbert, the comic strip character who, the publisher says on the book's jacket, "has become the poster boy of corporate America [where] millions of office dwellers tack the comic strip to their walls when murdering the boss is not an acceptable option."
Dilbert is a spectacled, tubular-headed employee wearing an Lshaped tie and toiling in a demeaning cubicle. Other characters include his nitwitted, sadistic boss with horn-like hair and Dogbert, a multiple role player who may be, for example, Dilbert's sidekick one moment and consultant to the company the next.
The author "worked" (my quotation marks, which will be understood later) for many years in cubicles at Pacific Bell and elsewhere. He draws his material from those earlier years, from accounts of happenings at work e-mailed to him by real cubicle dwellers, and also, I'm sure, from his own imagination.
He says in the introduction ("Why is Business So Absurd?") that, no matter how hard he tries to make the comic strip absurd, he is outstripped by the real absurdities people experience "in their own workplaces" and then describe in e-mail messages to him (some 200 daily). His answer to his question is that "people are idiots" many times each day. He says his "theory" about our idiocy led to his Dilbert Principle, and that it is the successor to the Peter Principle. The latter holds that competent people rise in organizations until they reach their level of incompetence. The former holds that none of us is competent even at the...