If Dilbert is the official cartoon of the Internet, as it has been called, then Scott Adams, his creator, is surely the official cartoonist of the Internet. It’s not just that many of the strips touch on the mismanagement of technology at the corporate level and the absurdities of the Web. Nor that Dogbert, Dilbert’s sidekick, claims to have invented the first Web browser (with the aid of their garbage man).
No, Adams is the official cartoonist of the Internet because without the Internet it’s most unlikely he would have achieved the tremendous fame and fortune that are now his. And what success it is. His strip appears in 1,550 newspapers in 41 countries. He’s published three humor books that have camped out on the New York Times best seller list for up to 39 weeks in a row. And, if that’s not enough, the Fox network is preparing a live-action sitcom based on the Dilbert character for the fall.
Dilbert – as everyone must know by now – is a relentlessly mediocre engineer with a pot belly and a tie that flies in the air. He is a cult hero for millions of cubicle-confined white-collar workers who suffer the humiliating fate of working for faceless, idiotic corporations. (A few IROs may secretly be able to relate to that one). Other regular characters in the strip include Dogbert, who is extremely smart and wants world domination. ‘Dogbert’s role is to gain power at the expense of other people,’ explains Adams.
The strip’s current personality and popularity date back to 1993. Originally, Dilbert story lines involved dating mishaps and life at home, along with the traumas of working for a large corporation.The strip was being run in just 100 newspapers in the US – mediocre even by Dilbert’s standards. Everything changed in 1993, when Adams added his e-mail address ([email protected]) to the comic strip and started receiving floods of e-mail from fans.
From his e-mail Adams learned that what really captured his audience’s imagination and heart was the strip’s depiction of the absurdity of Dilbert’s corporate life. He discovered that the ridiculous behavior of many bosses and corporations was first and foremost in the minds of his readers. They told him outrageous stories of outrageous actions taken by incompetent managers. He started writing those crazy episodes into his comic strips.
‘It was obvious I was asking for feedback, and that’s when I changed the nature of the strip from a mix of about 20 percent office humor to about 80 percent. It took on a personality at that time,’ says Adams.
The Dilbert Principle
That forceful personality lampoons corporate management. One of the central tenets is the Dilbert Principle. Rather than being promoted to the highest level of incompetence (the Peter Principle), in the Dilbert Principle the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management.
‘Incompetent workers are promoted directly to management without ever passing through a competent stage’, says Adams. And he’s tapped into a deep vein of disenchantment inside corporate America. Indeed, Dilbert has become the hero of the downsized workers – and those who live in fear of downsizing.
Adams still receives about 300 e-mails on an average day and when his electronic newsletter goes out, that goes up to 800-1,000 for a few days. He tries to read them all, but no longer has time to answer each one personally.
The 40-year-old cartoonist spent 17 years working in what he calls ‘humiliating jobs,’ first at a bank and then later for Pacific Bell. It was when he was asked to leave his day job as an applications engineer for Pac Bell in 1995 that Adams decided to devote full time to Dilbert. He was nudged out when a new boss took him up on a longstanding offer to resign if management felt his costs exceeded his benefits to the company.
Adams’ first attempts at cartooning were quashed when he was turned down at the tender age of eleven by the Famous Artists School, a notoriously non-selective correspondence school (the minimum age was twelve). In his adult attempt, he bought a book about how to become a cartoonist and decided to give it another try. His idea for Dilbert was one of about six strips selected by United Media out of 3-4,000 submissions received that year.
Now Adams works most days from about 6 am to midnight in his east San Francisco Bay-area house, which he shares with a girlfriend and two cats. He pens his strip in the first hour and then spends the remainder of the day reading and answering e-mails, speaking, writing, doing interviews and designing licensed products.
Adams, who has an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley, shrugs off the business brilliance of the positioning of Dilbert. ‘I did what people who write business books haven’t figured out – that for every manager there are ten people being managed. I wrote for the ten instead of the one. People are still puzzled trying to figure out why I sell ten times as many books, but you do the math.’
Even though Adams credits the Internet with much of his success, that doesn’t stop him from lambasting it. On the positive side, he says, ‘It has allowed people to satisfy that need to be at work for 14 hours without actually doing more than eight hours work. My theory is that knowledge workers can only do three hours of good work a day anyway. The rest is filler.’ Thanks to the Internet, we now have something to keep us occupied those filler hours. As one of his cartoons asks: ‘How did people ever look busy before they had computers?’
Adams has added to the resources available for those trying to look spuriously busy with the creation of the Dilbert Zone (www. unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert). ‘We don’t track it, but based on the messages, I assume most people are visiting the site from work because it looks just like work from a distance,’ says Adams.
The Dilbert Zone is another way the Internet has contributed to Adams’ success. This site went up on the Web back in 1995 and another burst of activity followed in which more newspapers picked up the strip. Because people could see the cartoon on the Web, although it wasn’t in their local papers, more were hooked. ‘Our salespeople went into newspapers with a handful of requests for the strip from their territory. And that’s very persuasive if you are an editor,’ suggests Adams.
Adams himself no longer does as much work on the site as he once did. And in a confession that shows you just how far he has come, he admits: ‘I hate to say it, but I act like a manager.’
If you thought management couldn’t get any worse, Adams claims the Internet, and e-mail in particular, have actually highlighted incompetence. ‘E-mail allows what would normally be a small dab of stupidity to be magnified 1,000 times, thanks to the miracle of copy all.’
Adams’ mostly true examples of abusive and stupid management – as shown up in Dilbert strips – are not a strictly American thing, judging by the success and response from around the world. ‘I get a lot of e-mail from Brazil, Sweden, Australia and everywhere, so I would say it’s the same the world over – except for the Far East.’
The Japanese are weary of American management fads and are anxious to avoid management by the Dilbert Principle. ‘The Japanese seem to be seeing Dilbert as what not to do. A warning signal,’ suggests Adams.
Domestic Fan Scene
He expects most of his fans to be American for a long time yet since more people in the US are online than anywhere else. In a moment of rare seriousness, Adams says the US leads the world on the Internet for several reasons: ‘It’s everything – a good educational system, a good telephone network and a culture that prizes creativity and risk taking. But the biggest reason is the availability of venture capital,’ he says. Adams then turns his attention to venture capitalists. ‘You want a job where you can fail nine out of ten times and still go home feeling good? You want a job you could do if you were brain dead?’ he asks. ‘Of course,’ he continues, ‘stockbrokers have about the same success rate.’ Ouch. Spoken like a man who might have lost a bundle lately.
Adams credits his ‘awesome powers of logic, crystal clear observations, almost frightening intuition and total lack of guilt’ with his ability to accurately predict the future of the Internet. ‘It’s going to be bigger and faster, and there’s going to be more of it. [Internet users] have a pretty good idea of what they want. They just don’t want to sit there until their asses become one with their chairs,’ says Adams.
The cartoonist isn’t convinced we need much more in the way of technological advances. ‘The bar is getting higher every year. I personally have fallen below the competence level. We are going to hit a brick wall as to how people can use a computer for anything more than a plant holder,’ predicts Adams, who sees no easy solution to the problem.
‘I’m not sure engineers are the right ones to fix it. They are the cause of the problem,’ he contends. A big part of the problem is that stupidity isn’t limited to management but runs right through the population. ‘I think there is an entire segment of a population that is too stupid to fly – they don’t know who to call. They don’t know how to get to the airport. About 25 percent of the population is functionally illiterate,’ says Adams. He’s not worried about offending these people. ‘They aren’t reading your magazine,’ he says.
As computing has become more and more powerful, the cartoonist believes, it’s alienated large sections of the population. As this continues, Adams sees a world of technology haves and have-nots.
Although that’s no amazingly new prediction, Adams’ take on it is original. For him, it’s the have-nots who will turn out to be the lucky ones.
