[892] in Humor
HUMOR: Scott Adams in the WSJ
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andrew A. Bennett)
Thu May 25 09:14:57 1995
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 25 May 1995 09:11:10 EDT
From: "Andrew A. Bennett" <abennett@MIT.EDU>
Date: Wed, 24 May 95 12:48:27 PDT
From: Connie_Kleinjans@Novell.COM (Connie Kleinjans)
From: Brian Lyons <blyons@logsun01.med.osd.mil>
>From mmedley@skyserv4.med.osd.mil
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
MONDAY, MAY 22, 1995
Manager's Journal: The Dilbert Principle ---- By Scott Adams
I use a lot of "bad boss" themes in my syndicated cartoon
strip, "Dilbert." I'll never run out of material. I get a
hundred e-mail messages a day, mostly from people who are
complaining about their own clueless managers. Here are some
of my favorite stories, all allegedly true:
-- A vice president insists that the company's new
battery-powered product be equipped with a light that comes
on to tell you when the power is off.
-- An employee suggests setting priorities so they'll know
how to apply their limited resources. The manager's
response: "Why can't we concentrate our resources across the
board?"
-- A manager wants to find and fix software bugs more
quickly. He offers an incentive plan: $20 for each bug the
Quality Assurance people find and $20 for each bug the
programmers fix. (These are the same programmers who create
the bugs.) Result: An underground economy in "bugs" springs
up instantly. The plan is rethought after one employee nets
$1,700 the first week.
Stories like these prompted me to do the first annual
Dilbert Survey to find out what management practices were
most annoying to employees. The choices included the usual
suspects: Quality, Empowerment, Re-engineering and the like.
But the number-one vote-getter on this highly unscientific
survey was "Idiots Promoted to Management."
This seemed like a subtle change from the old concept
where capable workers were promoted until they reached their
level of incompetence -- the Peter Principle. Now,
apparently, the incompetent workers are promoted directly to
management without ever passing through the temporary
competence stage.
When I entered the workforce in 1979, the Peter Principle
described management pretty well. Now I think we'd all like
to return to those Golden Years when you had a boss who was
once good at something. I get all nostalgic when I think
about it. Back then, we all had hopes of being promoted
beyond our levels of competence. Every worker had a shot at
someday personally navigating the company into the tar pits
while reaping large bonuses and stock options. It was a time
when inflation meant everybody got an annual raise; a time
when we freely admitted that the customer didn't matter. It
was a time of joy.
We didn't appreciate it then, but the Peter Principle
always provided us with a boss who understood what we did
for a living. Granted, he made consistently bad decisions --
after all, he had no management skills. But at least they
were the informed decisions of a seasoned veteran from the
trenches.
Example:
Boss: "When I had your job I could drive a three-inch rod
through a metal casing with one motion. If you're late again
I'll do the same thing to your head."
Lately, however, the Peter Principle has given way to the
Dilbert Principle. The basic concept of the Dilbert
Principle is that the most ineffective workers are
systematically moved to the place where they can do the
least damage: management. This has not proved to be the
winning strategy that you might think.
Maybe we should learn something from nature. In the wild,
the weakest moose is hunted down and killed by Dingo dogs,
thus ensuring survival of the fittest. This is a harsh
system -- especially for the Dingo dogs that have to fly all
the way from Australia. But nature's process is a good one;
everybody agrees, except perhaps for the Dingo dogs and the
moose in question . . . and the flight attendants. But the
point is that we'd all be better off if the least competent
managers were being eaten by Dingo dogs instead of writing
mission statements.
It seems as if we've turned nature's rules upside down. We
systematically identify and promote the people who have the
least skills. The usual business rationalization for
promoting idiots (the Dilbert Principle in a nutshell) is
something along the lines of "Well, he can't write code, he
can't design a network, and he doesn't have any sales
skill. But he has very good hair . . ."
If nature started organizing itself like a modern
business, you'd see, for example, a band of mountain
gorillas led by an "alpha" squirrel. And it wouldn't be the
most skilled squirrel; it would be the squirrel nobody
wanted to hang around with.
I can see the other squirrels gathered around an old stump
saying stuff like "If I hear him say `I like nuts' one more
time, I'm going to kill him." The gorillas, overhearing
this conversation, lumber down from the mist and promote the
unpopular squirrel. The remaining squirrels are assigned to
Quality Teams as punishment.
You may be wondering if you fit the description of a
Dilbert Principle manager. Here's a little test:
1. Do you believe that anything you don't understand must
be easy to do?
2. Do you feel the need to explain in great detail why
"profit" is the difference between income and expense?
3. Do you think employees should schedule funerals only
during holidays?
4. Are the following words a form of communication or
gibberish:
"The Business Services Leadership Team will enhance the
organization in order to continue on the journey toward a
Market Facing Organization (MFO) model. To that end, we are
consolidating the Object Management for Business Services
into a cross strata team."
5. When people stare at you in disbelief, do you repeat
what you just said, only louder and slower?
Now give yourself one point for each question you answered
with the letter "B." If your score is greater than zero,
congratulations -- there are stock options in your future.
(The language in number 4 is from an actual company memo.)
---
Mr. Adams is the creator of Dilbert, which appears in 450
newspapers. He still works his day job at Pacific Bell.
