The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle's Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads, & Other Workplace Afflictions

Adams, Scott

3.87

9,874 ratings by Goodreads

9780694516926: The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle's Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads, & Other Workplace Afflictions

ISBN 10: 0694516929 ISBN 13: 9780694516926

Publisher: HarperAudio, 1996

The creator of Dilbert, the fastest-growing comic strip in the nation, takes a look at corporate America in all its glorious lunacy.These hilarious essays on incompetent bosses, rampant management fads, bewildering technological changes, and so much more, will make anyone who has ever worked in an office laugh out loud in recognition.

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 through Dilbert, his enormously popular comic strip. In Dilbert, the potato-shaped, abuse-absorbing hero of the strip, Adams has given voice to the millions of Americans buffeted by the many adversities of the work place.

Now he takes the next step, attacking corporate culture head-on in this light-hearted series of essays. Adams explores the zeitgeist of ever-changing management trends, overbearing egos, management incompetence, bottomless bureaucracies, petrifying performance reviews, three-hour meetings, the confusion of the information super highway, and more.

With sharp eyes, and an even sharper wit, Adams exposes, and skewers, the bizarre absurdities of everyday corporate life. The Dilbert Principle rings so true! Listeners will be convinced that he has been spying on their bosses.

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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.

About the Author:

Scott Adams is the creator of Dilbert, the comic strip that now appears in 1,550 newspapers worldwide. His first two hardcover business books, The Dilbert Principle and Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook, have sold more than two million copies and have appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for a combined total of sixty weeks.

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