‘Dilbert’ Cartoonist Takes Another Poke At Clueless Managers Latest Book Mocks Cavalier Attitude, Elitist Approach To Workers

In his new Dilbert book, “Dogbert’s Top Secret Management Handbook,” cartoonist/business satirist Scott Adams presents the 12-step program of employee humiliation, starting with “decrease the average size of raises” and concluding with “shave their heads.”

Hah hah. Not exactly subtle, which Adams readily admits. “I wrote this book as a sledgehammer,” Adams said in a recent telephone conference call.

But then, the corporate world from which Dilbert is drawn is not exactly subtle, either. Adams recounted one of the recent anecdotes he received about life in cubicleland: At the company picnic, a manager got up to give this motivational speech: “Ten percent of you are doing work. I consider the rest of you leeches.”

As long as managers keep providing the material, Adams will keep drawing what has become perhaps the nation’s most popular cartoon strip. “Dogbert’s Top Secret Management Handbook” (HarperBusiness, $16) is Adams’ second to incorporate text and strips, and battle-weary veterans of the corporate trenches are likely to buy it as enthusiastically as they did “The Dilbert Principle.”

The latest book is a mock advice book for managers - how to justify what they do, and how to maintain the advantage over that pack of whining malcontents known as employees. In providing such advice, Adams lets slip some things employees have always suspected about the higher-ups:

Managers don’t have a lot of real work to do. In the 40-hour workweek, “unless things are broken, there’s not a lot of managerish things to do,” Adams said. That leads to micromanaging and the creation of work.

Managers don’t think much of their employees. You think he jests? Adams said some managers are literally pasting little gold stars to the work of employees - “just like first grade.”

Managers are technologically clueless. Managers who consult such technology periodicals as People and Newsweek go around telling subordinates to accomplish tasks that defy the laws of physics and nature - things like “make these electrical outlets digital.”

To cover up their cluelessness, managers love buzzwords and hot concepts and jump on them “like a starving squirrel on the last peanut on Earth.” Some of the concepts, like re-engineering, actually make a lot of sense in theory, Adams said, but “it’s not the concept so much, it’s that idiots implement it.”

From the 350 or so e-mail messages he gets a day (at ScottAdams(at)aol.com) Adams believes things aren’t getting any better, even with Dilbert strips pasted to every office wall and partition in America.

Adams said he can draw a strip based on something he saw five years ago, it will run in newspapers three months later, and he’ll get a response from someone who experienced the strip’s topic that day. “Things are not changing as fast as you think.”

One reason they’re not, Adams surmises, is that downsizing has tipped the scales toward managers. “The balance of power changed - they didn’t have to make their employees happy.”

Can the beleaguered workers still remaining in corporations expect to see more of Dilbert?

“I don’t plan on doing things differently,” he said, “at least for the next five years.”