Book Review: Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook

It's another rerun...I returned to my e-books-to-read list, and the book I read today was another Sunday book. I should come to something thoroughly secular soon. I already have a few reviews scheduled for October (Halloween) and December (Christmas) too.

Book Title: Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook

Author: Scott Adams

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 depended 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 liked Dilbert cartoons.

While most cartoonists settled for reprinting last year's cartoon strips as a book, Scott Adams pieced his books together with fresh new text in which he explained the thoughts that inspired the cartoons. The use of text seemed to inspire him to fresh satirical blasts. Every page or two still contained a cartoon.

It's all very funny, and while humor-challenged socialists griped because the strip never recommended nationalizing the industry, I occasionally asked myself why Dilbert, Wally, and Alice didn'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." More than the need to keep the comic strip's appeal to its audience, protectionist laws were what kept 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. It's tempting to listen to those who say "Just give up your silly idea and get a real job." 

As if tedium, stupidity, and backstabbing were what made a job "real"?