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"They Call Me Mister Dilbert"

Scott Adams On Cubicle Consciousness

Since Renewal Day is a time for personal recentering, I will begin with a personal note: I am a blatant envier of Scott Adams. I have been writing about the ups and downs of business life for 15 years, looking for just the right combination of astute observation, wry humor, and business respectability. My goal has been to tell the truth about where things go wrong in organizations, then offer useful hints on how to make things better. As a result of these efforts I have sold about — let's see — 11 books.

Whereas Scott Adams chopped off one half of my formula (the useful hints part), thumbed his nose at respectability, and proceeded to sell umpty-ump million of his books lambasting the stupidity of organizational life.

It helps that I adore the cartoons. Whereas Adams the man gives off about as much emotional heat as salt cod, his cartoons are like the lumps of coal Superman used to squeeze into diamonds. Looking at those diamonds, you knew that, in addition to being nature's purest and hardest form of carbon, they were also as hot as hell, from all the pressurizing. Adams' cartoons are like that, radiating the mean, pitiless heat of knowing that people (especially bosses — us) are deluded idiots, and the chance of their becoming wiser any time soon, of their acquiring "executive EQ," is a laugh and a half.

Those of us who expected Adams to present a talk combining Dilbert humor with management insights might have been a bit disappointed. Instead, he spoke about the things he really understands — his career as a cartoonist, interesting altercations with editors and with the public and with his destiny as a millionaire syndicated cartoonist.

Part of the price of fame, Adams finds, is that the media feel his looks are fair game. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Business Week have all written lovingly about his weak features and slight build. "I've decided it is the Bill Gates Effect," he said. "The more successful you become, the uglier you must be."

Trained as an economist, Adams originally sought a more colorful career. A main requirement was that he be able to do his work in his pajamas. With that as the main desideratum, he narrowed his choices to poet, Supreme Court justice, Hugh Hefner, and cartoonist. (He briefly considered a career in the papacy, but decided that being non-Catholic was too much of a handicap.) Poetry didn't pay enough, being a Supreme Court justice had a chilling effect on the kinds of videos one could rent earlier in life, and living in the Playboy mansion surrounded by gorgeous half-clad women struck Adams as unhygienic. So, at age 10, he settled on cartooning.

As his first foray into the world of big bucks doodling, Adams applied at age 11 to an address on the back of a matchbook, the Famous Artists School for Young People. The cartoon he submitted was a picture of a car, saying put-put-put, with an inexpressive dog (the prototype for Dogbert?) stationed in the margin. But it was not to be. Weeks later he received the sad news from the school that you have to be at least 12 to be a famous artist.

Giving up on art, Adams studied to become an economist and toiled in the land of the cubicles for Pacific Bell until just a couple of years ago. But at one point he came up with the goal of getting one cartoon published before he died. To that end he sent out cartoons to countless publishers and syndicates. The rejections came back swiftly. For the most part.

Months later, however, he got a call from an unfamiliar company named United Media. His cartoons about the man with the upthrust necktie and the impassive little dog had struck a chord. They wanted to syndicate him. Suspicious, Adams asked if they had any experience placing cartoons. Well, they had Peanuts, and Garfield, and Nancy, and Marmaduke. Adams simply didn't know mega-syndicator United Features' parent company's name. "It was the stupidest moment of my life," he said.

With his new life as syndicated cartoonist under way, Adams found it necessary to play games with intervening editors. "I adopted a Ty Cobb strategy of arguing every call, on the grounds that the next close call would go my way." It was not considered kosher to have Satan actually appear in the strip — too many literalists out there. So Adams put a character in an obvious devil suit, and put a giant spoon in his hand instead of a pitchfork. (He figured he could sneak up on a true depiction of evil, replacing the spoon in time with a spork.)

Still, literalists were not appeased. A man named Kenneth J. Dork wrote in complaining about the column's less than reverential use of the word dork. Contrite, Adams apologized in print to all the Dorks out there who might be offended. When a corporate lawyer complained about trademark infringement in his cavalier use of the expression ant farms, Adams did a script in which he said the true habitat for disgusting subhuman creatures was not an Ant FarmJ but a law school.

Adams shared with us his insights into what makes successful humor. He described six possible ways of being funny — cute, recognizable, mean, bizarre, naughty, and clever — and showed how different strips used at least two of these as a success formula. Family Circus, for instance, is cute and recognizable. Doonesbury is mean and clever. Garfield is cute and mean. Dilbert, in Adams' opinion, combines elements of recognizable, clever, mean, and bizarre. No one has accused Ratbert of being cute.

But there is a level of inspiration that formula cannot take us through. Adams led us through the creation of a strip. In the first panel, the boss is telling staff members that at one time the company felt its employees were its most valuable asset (recognizable but also bizarre, a boss telling the truth). In the middle panel, the boss clarifies that further research showed that employees were actually the eighth most valuable asset. One employee says he is not sure he wants to know what ranked seventh.

And here is where genius takes over. You or I might come up with a seventh most valuable office supply item that would be funny but commonplace (Post-it notes, pushpins, mouse pads). Adams reached way back for a reference that was withering because it was not only valueless but obsolete: carbon paper.

Oh, sure, it is great to be America's most-beloved management guru, but Adams is no pie-eyed optimist. He knows that the average emotional intelligence of the workplace never gets out of the single digits. And he has the examples of cartoonists who bailed out because cartooning no longer challenged them (Robert Watterson and Calvin and Hobbes, Berke Breathed and Bloom County, Gary Larson and The Far Side). Diagnosis: burnout. Will the flame likewise claim Scott Adams as its own?

"It is funny how, when you have $25 million in the bank, drawing a cartoon every day seems like a lot," he replied. So far, he says, he hasn't stashed anywhere near that much away. Likeliest scenario: Adams will be with us till the end of time, like Ernie Bushmiller, chronicling the lives of the clueless in the land of the cubicles.