The Dilbert Principle - Scott Adams

The Dilbert Principle : A Cubicle's-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads & Other Workplace Afflictions by Scott Adams

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I had found "The Dilbert Principle" two years ago in a previous flat in Bangalore, stowed away in a shelf with other scrap paper. After inquiring as to whether any of the flatmates owned it, I pulled it out, dusted it, smelt the yellowing pages and kept it in my shelf. But for the gain in status, the book achieved little else. It travelled to Delhi when I moved and sat in a shelf there for a really long time. I found it sitting in silent anticipation while rummaging through the shelf to find something to read with an unexpected free week in front of me.

My Dilbert experience had, quite strangely, started with another borrowed book : "The Dilbert Future". I was still in college back then and could not really appreciate office humour to the fullest. But I could certainly appreciate humour. And Scott Adams's was the king that I preferred. It was insane and dry, just the kind that I liked. But in the many years since that first Adams book, I have read more of Dilbert and started appreciating it for the office humour as well. I picked up this book with quite an expectation which mellowed as I turned the first few yellow pages. The book was more than twenty years old! Surely office humour from the nineties would be irrelevant in the current world. I couldn't have been more wrong. The only thing out of date about the book was the way the characters were drawn. Everything else, including the humour was strangely fresh and relevant.

"The Dilbert Principle" like all other Dilbert topics, deals with the stupidity of people. In particular, it focusses on the stupidity of people in the corporate environment, right from the upper management down to the lowly engineers. Scott tries to explain to the baffled audience what the corporate world is all about. He picks out various concepts like 'Business Plans', 'Budgeting', 'Meetings, 'Team Work', etc. and explains the difference between their apparent and perceived meanings. He explains how and why the real motive of 'Business Communication' is to hide information and confuse your co-workers rather than conveying clear information, as many naive corporate employees mistake it to be. Adams illustrates his points with the help of short strips and pickings from the fan mails that he receives.

Adams is a riot. I always have liked his work, and his writing is no different. What was most surprising was the relevancy of his humour after all these years, though that is not something that Scott can take credit for. It is amazing to see how the corporates have managed to stay so stale in the fast paced business environment of today. As for Scott, I do continue to read his work on his blog and will readily pick up another of his book if and when I come across one.

View all my reviews