Here is an excerpt from 250words.com on what it takes to be an effective manager and then book review on The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle’s-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads & Other Workplace Afflictions by Scott Adams.
“No matter how smart you are, you spend much of your day being an idiot. That’s the central premise of this scholarly work,” Scott Adams writes in The Dilbert Principle.
The title of Adams’ book refers to an office maxim: the most ineffective workers are systemically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management. “If nature started organizing itself like a modern business,” Adam explains, “you’d see… 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.”
With this enlightening image in mind, Adams offers readers a chance to see if they fit the description of a “Dilbert Principle manager.”
1. Do you believe that anything you don’t understand must be easy?
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 more slowly?
Full article via 250words.com, more on the book below
The Dilbert Principle – Description
The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle’s-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads & Other Workplace Afflictions by Scott Adams
The creator of Dilbert, the fastest-growing comic strip in the nation (syndicated in nearly 1000 newspapers), takes a look at corporate America in all its glorious lunacy. Lavishly illustrated with Dilbert strips, these hilarious essays on incompetent bosses, 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 workplace.
Now he takes the next step, attacking corporate culture head-on in this lighthearted series of essays. Packed with more than 100 hilarious cartoons, these 25 chapters explore the zeitgeist of ever-changing management trends, overbearing egos, management incompetence, bottomless bureaucracies, petrifying performance reviews, three-hour meetings, the confusion of the information superhighway and more. With sharp eyes, and an even sharper wit, Adams exposes — and skewers — the bizarre absurdities of everyday corporate life. Readers will be convinced that he must be spying on their bosses, The Dilbert Principle rings so true!
The Dilbert Principle – Review
Amazon 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. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Adams worked in a cubicle at Pacific Bell for nine years. From there he went on to pen the wildly popular cartoon Dilbert, which appears in over 700 newspapers. He is also the author of six Dilbert books (e.g., Bring Me the Head of Willy the Mailboy, Andrews & McMeel, 1995) and an electronic Dilbert newsletter, has a Web site on the Internet, and is a frequent speaker at business gatherings. His latest book of humorous essays and observations elaborates on the corporate scenarios depicted in his cartoons. “The Dilbert Principle” asserts that the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management. Chapters include such titles as “Machiavellian Methods,” “Pretending To Work,” and “Engineers, Scientists, Programmers, and Other Odd People.” The book is replete with such advice as “Never walk down the hall without a document in your hand” and “The worth of any project is how it will sound on your resume.” He stresses the importance of using the word paradigm as often as possible, discusses the value of computers in pretending to be busy, and recommends that workers awaiting performance reviews openly display copies of Soldier of Fortune magazine on their desks. This cynical, satirical, all-too-familiar glimpse of corporate life is unabashed management bashing and is very funny. Recommended for all humor and business collections.Alan Farber, Northern Illinois Univ., DeKalb
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
