Book Review: Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook

A Book You Can Buy From Me

Book Title: Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook


Author: Scott Adams

Author's web page: http://dilbert.com/blog

Date: 1996

Publisher: Harper Collins

ISBN: 0-88730-788-4

Illustrations: cartoons by the author

Quote: "If you are not a manager, put this book down right now."

The comedy of the Dilbert cartoon series depends on two basic premises: (1) The managers of the offices you know are human beings, not dogs, cats, rats, or lunatics whose few remaining hairs form little devil horns. (2) If the decisions of the managers you know seem arbitrary, egotistical, and silly, you have a constitutional right to warn them that they're going wrong by showing them a Dilbert cartoon.

Therefore, everybody likes Dilbert cartoons.

While most cartoonists settle for reprinting last year's cartoon strips as a book, Scott Adams pieces his books together with fresh new text in which he explains the thoughts that inspired the cartoons. The use of text seems to inspire him to fresh satirical blasts. Every page or two continues to contain a cartoon.

It's all very funny, and while humor-challenged socialists gripe because the strip never recommends nationalizing the industry (could this be because few of us believe it could work?), I occasionally ask myself why Dilbert, Wally, and Alice don't just start their own business. Big business secret #1: small, efficient businesses are to big, bloated businesses as Jerry Rice is to Rush Limbaugh. Big business secret #2: big, bloated businesses have lobbied for years to create illogical laws that function to keep small, efficient businesses from running circles around big, bloated businesses. You can blame protectionist laws on capitalism and Big Business, or on socialism and Big Government, or (like Lincoln Steffens) simply on "corruption." My point is, protectionist laws are what keep Dilbert, Wally, and Alice chained to their cubicles.

Now you know. Knowledge is power. Now you can cut through some of the bloat and necrosis in whatever business you're in. You can be ethical, 99% stress-free while you work, efficient, and creatively fulfilled in self-employment...works for me, when I get work. Or you can join the crowd who just try to be grateful that their wage-slave job isn't quite as ridiculous as Dilbert's.

If you decide to be independent, I think you may need Dilbert more than the wage slaves do. From time to time we need reminders of what we're missing.