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| From Technology Review, January 1995 (cover story) INTERVIEW Scott Adams: Gadfly of the High-Tech Workplace . . . . . . . . . . . . . By David Brittan YOU KNOW you've made it in the business world when your stippled pen-and-ink likeness appears on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Scott Adams got there recently, but not by virtue of his skill at negotiating corporate mergers. Rather, his specialty is skewering the very people whose faces one is accustomed to seeing in the nation's business pages. Adams, the 37-year-old creator of the comic strip "Dilbert," dispenses barbs at vicious bosses, out-of-control technology, and pointless bureacracy in the funny pages of over 260 newspapers in the United States and abroad, as well as on the World Wide Web and America Online. The title character—the rotund, mouthless Dilbert, whose tie has a permanent upward crook like a saxophone—is an electrical engineer and computer programmer in the employ of a corporation that serves no obvious purpose. Dilbert suffers repeated indignities at the hands of his supervisor, whom Adams describes alternately as "Everyboss" and "the exaggeration of the worst boss ever." Boss to Dilbert: "I decided to recognize you for your job performance. So I named one of my pencils after you." In fact, everybody hits on Dilbert. Bumped from an airline flight, Dilbert is last seen strapped to the wing and wondering if there really is a "duct tape section." The only character whose self-esteem remains intact is Dilbert's semifaithful hound, the bespectacled Dogbert, who often gets the last word. "Dilbert," first syndicated in 1989, offers something for practically everyone who works in a white-collar setting. For executives who can tolerate gibes at attitudes and principles they hold dear, it is an informal, not-for-credit management course that convenes daily. For the masses of underlings who have little control over their corporate destinies, the strip is both a vindication and a survival guide. But perhaps the main beneficiaries of "Dilbert"—provided they have a sense of irony—are engineers and other technical professionals, whose foibles "Dilbert" exhaustively catalogs. Seated at his computer, a software developer is trying to design a user-friendly product: "I'll make the command easy to remember, like 'CTRL-ALT-F4-DEL.' And if they forget that, they can just edit the source code in 'COMMAND.COM.' Perfect." Martha Gray, an associate professor of electrical and medical engineering at MIT, doesn't mind this kidding a bit. "One of my collaborators, a biologist, clips and sends me the strip whenever it makes a suitable jab at the way engineers think," she says. "I find it amazingly accurate." Although Dilbert usually ends up the worse for any encounter with his co-workers, engineers can take heart when he parlays his technical skill into social advantage. A typical "revenge of the nerds" scenario: Office thug: Yo, Dilbert, give me your lunch money or I'll erase your data diskettes. Dilbert: Touch my data and I'll erase any mention of you from the main payroll computer. Office thug: No . . . Please, I'm sorry. Dilbert (to audience): Nothing is more pathetic than an aging school bully. Office thug: I took shop; I can make you some nice bookends. "Dilbert" strikes such a chord with engineering types that Adams and his fictional creation were named to the "All-Star Team" of influential engineers as part of 1994's National Engineers Week, sponsored by several august professional associations. As the strip's popularity spreads, its shy but acerbic author is becoming a veritable guru of the high-tech workplace. "Dilbert" strips can be found taped to cubicles in engineering firms, law offices, and accounting houses. Adams's speaking engagements at conferences are mobbed. Book signings that accompany the publication of "Dilbert" collections—with titles such as Build a Better Life by Stealing Office Supplies and Always Postpone Meetings with Time-Wasting Morons—draw hundreds of autograph seekers. And management experts like Tom Peters (the excellence maven) and Michael Hammer (the father of "reengineering") have requested original drawings of strips that lampooned their pet theories. Adams is well situated to observe engineering and workplace culture. First, there is his day job. While pursuing an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley in the early 1980s, Adams went to work for Crocker National Bank in a position that required him to learn computer programming. For the past nine years, he has worked as an applications engineer at Pacific Bell in San Ramon, Calif., a job that he says provides him with plenty of fodder for "Dilbert." "There's no such thing as an entirely bad day," Adams likes to say, "because the worst day is just material for the strip." He draws "Dilbert" in pencil each morning between 5 and 6 o'clock and inks it in while watching TV in the evening. But Adams's main window on the working world is provided by his readers. For several years, the cartoonist has published his e-mail address in each strip, enabling fans to bombard him with their office tribulations. Adams has accumulated thousands of corporate horror stories, many of which transform themselves into episodes of "Dilbert." His e-mail address, by the way, is scottadams@aol.com. David Brittan, a senior editor of Technology Review, recently ventured into the cul-de-sac-lined foothills of Dublin, Calif., east of San Francisco, where he found Scott Adams nursing a sprained wrist but pulling no punches. TR: Do the experiences that readers describe in their e-mail messages continue to surprise you? ADAMS: I got a great one recently. Somebody wrote that people had been riding their bicycles to work and they would bring them inside, not wanting them to be stolen. Then a memo came down from on high that said, "You cannot have bicycles indoors." So this individual wrote back, "I understand how you wouldn't want bicycles in the hallway, but how about in our offices, where we already have lots of personal effects?" The response came back: "It's a fire hazard." The guy replied, "How could it be a fire hazard in my office with the rest of my furniture?" The response came back that if there was grease sealed inside the bicycle frame and it got heated up, it could catch fire and make the bike blow up like a bomb. The management was actually afraid of exploding bicycles. The guy wrote back, "First of all, I've checked to make sure my grease is not flammable and second that the frame is not sealed. And third, I'm surrounded by other things that say 'flammable,' like the cleaner for the whiteboard." He lost. TR: Is management usually the villain in these accounts? ADAMS: I certainly get a lot of horrible-boss stories. Most of them are people telling me that what happened in the strip was identical to something that happened to them. My favorite, which did appear in the strip, was about a company that was giving out these little five-cent fuzzy things if you did a good job—a "warm fuzzy" that you were supposed to stick on your lapel. It just so completely and utterly misses what makes humans feel good about themselves or motivates them. That somebody would think giving this warm fuzzy would do the trick—to me that just said it all. TR: Do you have any theories about why so many managers can't manage? ADAMS: I suspect that most managers don't study management. I know that if my own managers ever took a class on how to manage people, it was probably a long time ago. I think a lot of that stuff is learnable, either in a formal setting or by example. At Pacific Bell, employees were asked to rate their management. We found that the winner was somebody who was a great manager and the runner-up was somebody who worked for that person and simply copied his management style. The employees, as it turned out, had no clue as to what these people were doing right. But the second-ranked manager happens to be my girlfriend, so of course I could ask her. Her technique was very simple. She handpicked her group, and she did it by chemistry, which is what her mentor did. She would say, "I've got these people who are good at this, you need someone who's just an energy source, you want both males and females so you've got a good mix of thought, and so on." Because they liked each other, they all ended up liking their jobs and they didn't mind the long hours. This was really the whole secret, and everything else took care of itself. TR: That's all it took to get people motivated? ADAMS: I think that humans are kind of pack animals; if they get any semblance of good leadership, they will rally. So you really have to screw up to be a bad manager. But obviously it happens all the time. TR: Dilbert's boss is incredibly out of touch with the work that Dilbert and his colleagues are doing. Do you think that's a particular pitfall of managing in a high-tech environment, where so much of the work is highly specialized? ADAMS: In the old days, if you were a bricklayer who got promoted to CEO of brickmaking, you pretty much knew what a brick was, and if somebody came to you with an idea, you'd know whether it was a good idea or a bad idea. But now if you're deciding whether to put in a wide-area network and whether you're going to use something like "asynchronous transfer mode" technology, it's unlikely you can know anything except what your people are telling you. You have this unique situation in history where the boss can't know what the employees are doing and can't really evaluate whether they're doing it correctly. They always have the ability to say "I'm not done yet, but here's a good reason why," and the reason will always sound convincing. So yeah, the boss is at a disadvantage. Really the only thing that works is to make the employees feel that doing the work is better than not doing the work, and doing it right is better than not doing it right—and to try to get the best people. TR: Do you ever think about how you would do things differently if you were a manager? ADAMS: I have been a manager in past incarnations, and who knows how good I was. The main thing I tried to do was make people feel like they'd rather come to work than stay home, and put a big emphasis on having a good time. Was that good? I don't know, but I had a good time. TR: That would be quite a stretch for Dilbert's boss, wouldn't it? ADAMS: It would be a stretch for most bosses. In an Industry Week survey a few years ago, three out of five managers reported that they didn't have fun at work, and of course lots of employers are suspicious of humor in the workplace. TR: You've said in the past that your strip plumbs those areas where "otherwise normal and intelligent people are idiots." What is it about office culture that reduces people to this state? ADAMS: First, there's the well-known phenomenon where you can't do anything useful with more than three people. With three people there's never a tie in making decisions, and the number is small enough so you can get together and schedule meetings. As soon as you reach four people, the IQ of the group goes down to about 90, and the ability to schedule a meeting is out of control—plus the likelihood of a tie goes up, so you rarely get an overwhelming consensus. Look at anything truly great in the world. You've got the Wright Brothers, and there were two of them. You've got Einstein, and there was one of him. Apple Computer—basically two of them, and later when they decided they needed to invent the Macintosh, they took a very small group of people and broke them off from the company. So the law of numbers is number one. Studies have shown that the most effective group is where one person is much smarter than the others and everybody else knows it. The worst group is when you've got, say, five really smart people, because they all think they've got a better idea. Another problem is the difficulty of hiring the right people for the right job. I don't have the answer for that, but I know that if all you're doing is talking to them, looking at their recommendations—which are always going to say "godlike"—and reading their resume, it's a crapshoot. You often end up with people who are great on paper but can't actually do what you hired them to do. This leads to a third major problem: the belief in process over capability. Now that you've got six really unqualified people in your group, the tendency is—since you can't get rid of them easily in a big company—to look for some way to transform them. And so there's this belief in the Holy Grail of process. If you can just reengineer them or send them to "quality school," maybe you can make incompetent people do good things. I don't know that it's ever worked, and it probably never will. TR: What management "process" do you consider the most misguided? ADAMS: I think empowerment is the silliest concept ever. Of course, you can't control everything your employees do, so you've got to give them some amount of authority. But empowerment assumes that your employees are capable of making the right decisions—and in my experience they're often not. Empowerment works great in places like Nordstrom department stores, because there's such a well-defined situation. Nordstrom salespeople follow a simple rule in dealing with customers: whatever is wrong, make it right. The worst that could happen is something that supposedly did happen: somebody came in to return tires and the salesperson gave them a refund. The trouble is, Nordstrom doesn't sell tires. Even that came out OK because now people hear this story and want to shop at Nordstrom. In a corporate setting, however, the worst thing an employee could do is blow millions of dollars. The worst case is just so bad that you can't really "empower" the employees except in a teeny, teeny, narrow range of things. Managers will let them order pencils and hope that this will somehow make a difference in the world. TR: Surely there are successful examples of corporate empowerment that other companies can use as models. ADAMS: Companies don't know how to use models. They superficially study examples in unrelated businesses and try to apply them to themselves. People manage by anecdote. Executives look at the building of the Macintosh and say, "Yep, that's the model. You take a bunch of people and go off unfettered and develop something." That worked for Apple because the people they took were some of the smartest people who've ever walked the face of the earth—bonafide geniuses. And they had several of them, which may just have been a huge coincidence. Plus they had the company's CEO on their team, so they had unlimited resources. But other companies—and I've seen this happen half a dozen times—fail to analyze the analogy correctly. They'll decide to follow the Macintosh model and then they'll pick the one thing that's the least important to that model to replicate. They'll say, "Well, it must have been because they were in a separate building." So they'll take all these people who are not performing but maybe have PhDs, and they'll put them in this building—without the CEO, of course, so they'll have no power and no money. And the company will say, "Go build us a Macintosh." It couldn't possibly work. TR: I'm surprised you're so negative toward empowerment, since Dilbert always seems to be at the mercy of corporate whims. Wouldn't Dilbert be a happier guy if he had a little more autonomy? ADAMS: I'm positive on empowerment in situations where it can work. But empowerment is a relatively minor issue for Dilbert. The real story of Dilbert is the basic disregard for his dignity as a human being, which is the biggest problem in workplaces generally. If you acknowledge people's basic dignity, suddenly all these other things seem less important. If somebody's feeling good about their job, they're going to go the extra mile. In my first job out of school, I was a bank teller. We were constantly told, "You have to use your judgment." But then if we cashed a bad check, which happened every day, we'd get yelled at. "You have to follow the rules," they'd say. "If you had followed the rules, you would have seen that he didn't have two IDs and his balance wasn't twice the amount of the check, and that you should not have cashed that check." But there were so many rules that if you followed them all, you couldn't do your job. So then we'd get into what might be called destructive compliance. We would try to follow the rules for a day, and the line would literally go out the door and wrap around the building, and the complaints would start. Suddenly the management would back off again and say, "You have to use your judgment." The point is that if I had felt good about that job and hadn't feared that my supervisor would call me stupid when I made a mistake, I would have tried harder to do the right thing and would have been much more efficient. I don't know if that's empowerment, but it's feeling that doing the right thing will create the right result. TR: Is there anything Dilbert could do to avoid having his dignity stomped on? ADAMS: Nah, he's kind of caught in the system. His entire self-worth is wrapped up in the fact that he has incredible facility with technology. Whether he uses it for anything beneficial is another story, but he's real good at it, and therefore he spends time, as we all do, doing those things he does best. TR: Dilbert is the stereotypical nerdy engineer—he's socially inept, slightly misanthropic, more comfortable with machines than with people. You've said before that this is because he's extremely focused on his work and in love with technology. Yet plenty of professionals in other fields are equally obsessed with their work without coming off as nerds. ADAMS: There is a difference. Having done a lot of programming for a number of years, I can say that you actually lose the ability to communicate with people after you've done it for a while. The best way I can explain it is this: Imagine that you're sitting at your computer and trying to write thousands of lines of instructions that will make something happen on your computer. At first, you just memorize a bunch of commands: if you do x, then y happens. But after you get good at it, you lose all sense that you're sitting there typing. The computer language no longer looks like bizarre code; you start thinking in it the way you think in English. The next thing you find is that in order to imagine how these thousands of lines of code are all related to each other and how they branch, you start imagining the program with you physically inside it, like a pinball machine. You say, "All right, if the control of the program is that ball that's coming down, and if I don't want it to go right through the middle, I'm going to build a bumper." That's one line of code. And you say, "But wait, the bumper is too small. I need a bigger bumper, and I need the ball to bounce off it in a certain way at a certain velocity." That's three more lines of code. "But wait, if I'm adding these three lines of code, then I've also got to have a bumper over here." So what you find is that you actually take yourself out of your body, and you spend hours doing something as exciting as sex. This seems unimaginable unless you've experienced it, but once you've been inside the pinball machine for a while, and you finally hit the flipper and the ball comes down right where you wanted it to, it is an exhilarating experience. It's unlike anything else. TR: Have you heard other programmers talk about this in the same terms? ADAMS: Some people refer to the "daze" or "being lost in cyberspace." Or else you see the glassy look in people's eyes, and when they talk, they talk as if you would understand their pinball machine, which you couldn't possibly. So you see the symptoms of it, although I don't think anybody even knows what's happening to them when it happens. I know that, when I'm programming, my girlfriend usually comments that I become uncommunicative for long periods of time. TR: Of course, programming is a narrow subset of engineering, and a relatively recent one. ADAMS: It doesn't matter if you're a programmer or a chemical engineer or a bridge builder—all types of design offer the same transcendental experience. You're inside the molecules and you're manipulating them, or you're mentally floating around the bridge. The thrill is intense, and I don't think you can experience it unless you have the kind of mind that can spend long periods inside the pinball machine. Not everybody can do that. Some people, for example, need to read a novel and have somebody else's imagination impressed upon them. Other people say, "Nothing I could read in a novel would be as interesting as what I can think and imagine and create on my own." So there are two kinds of people: those who want imagination given to them and those who want to be part of constructing it. The latter become engineers. TR: Do the strip's biggest supporters resemble Dilbert in some way? ADAMS: The most dedicated "Dilbert" readers could probably be characterized as nerds, but fans actually run the gamut. I spoke in Canada at a society of geological engineers, and the room was full of people in suits who all looked like they just came out of a business meeting. There probably wasn't an identifiable nerd within the group of 700—nah, I take that back. It was probably 5 percent hard-core nerd content; the rest were just businesspeople. TR: I thought you would have alienated that 95 percent. ADAMS: It surprises the hell out of me, but some of the biggest "Dilbert" fans are lawyers—an amazing number of them have asked for originals—and I nail lawyers all the time. My portrayal of engineers is certainly not positive either. And marketing people? Tons of fans are marketing people, and you know what I do to them. It's the weirdest job, where you can mock people and they'll like you for it. TR: Why do you suppose that is? ADAMS: I think people in a lot of professions often want to scream to the world, "I don't know what I'm doing! I'm just making this up!" So the strip gives them plenty to identify with in that regard. But it's hard for me to figure out why people like what they like, any more than I know why I like my favorite color. TR: If you were still drawing "Dilbert" strips 20 years from now, would you feel good about it or would you feel you were in a rut? ADAMS: Totally unpredictable. I guess the job would remain interesting if the nature of the work changed. If we had Dilbertland and Dilbert videos and Dilbert 3D holographic nanoworlds, that would be very cool. I have no sense of purity that Dilbert will be used in only one way. He's my employee, and damn it, he'll do what I tell him to do. db |