ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, June 2, 1996 TAG: 9605310075
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
Not many people recognize the name Scott Adams. But they have heard of his comic strip, Dilbert. The strip features Dilbert, an overweight eraserhead who has become a mythical champion of the cubicle class. In the strip, Dilbert is tormented and ridiculed by Dogbert, a sadistic sidekick who sometimes does free-lance work as a management consultant.
Adams, 38, is a bespectacled guy with average looks, a six-figure income and two cats.
The cartoonist, who quit his job at Pacific Bell last June to do the strip fulltime, has no employees. Aside from the fact employees cost money, it would be a crime punishable by hours of useless meetings for Dilbert's dad to become a boss.
Adams recently sat down with Boston Globe reporter Alex Pham to chat about being rich and famous and about his new book, ``The Dilbert Principle,'' published by Harper Business. It's on several national best-seller lists, above books on re-engineering and other topics that Adams gleefully lampoons.
Q: What is the Dilbert Principle?
A: It says that the most ineffective workers are systematically moved up to the place where they can do least damage - management.
Q: How do you keep your comics fresh?
A: How do I keep it from being deadly boring? I cheat. I get up to 300 e-mail messages a day. So I get it from other people. I let them do my work.
Q: What are people telling you?
A: Every manner of business griping you can imagine. I provide therapy for thousands of people. They say, ``I know this won't help you, but I sure felt good saying it.'' But most of the time they're complaining about clueless bosses who have a poor concept of space and time.
Q: What else?
A: People are really concerned about little stuff. The culture of the company is not defined by its mission statement because nobody pays attention to it. Culture is defined by stuff like how you handle your office supplies. Or popcorn. A lot of companies are putting a ban on popcorn - not the popcorn itself or the eating of it, but the smell of it. Companies are saying that there are only certain hours you can make microwave popcorn or that you can't make it at all.
There's also something else called densification. That's when they shrink the size of all the cubicles just a little bit, so they can fit more people on the floor. So you think you have it bad because all you have is a 6-by-6 space? Guess what? Tomorrow it's going to be 6-by-4!
Q: What do you make of ownsizing?
A: We used to have this myth that what's good for the company is good for the employee. Then downsizing came along, and clearly, what's good for the company is to get rid of the employees. If this were to be a trial, densification and popcorn are circumstantial evidence. Downsizing is the smoking gun and the people being laid off are the eyewitnesses.
Q: What's your notion of an ideal workplace?
A: My idea is to keep the employees happy by saying that you're no longer a bad employee if you leave at 5 o'clock. ... You want them to work the least number of hours that's economical, because that's when they do their best work. The employees are happier, and you might not even have to pay them as much because they'd rather work for you.
Q: What comics do you like to read?
A: I was big on Charles Schulz's Peanuts and Mad magazine. Life was really determined by Mad magazine. And Li'l Abner.
Q: When did you begin drawing?
A: I've always drawn. I took a drawing class in college, and I got the lowest grade in the class. Everything I drew looked like a cartoon. And they told me that wasn't art!
Q: Will serial cartoons, where the creator keeps a story line going for weeks at a time, disappear?
A: The problem is that people read newspapers differently. They don't read them every day anymore. People are just too busy. I think you really have to have a cartoon that stands alone each day.
Q: Who reads cartoons?
A: I've found that there are three kinds of comic readers. Like a good capitalist, I've segmented my market.
Twenty percent of the readers are attracted by the joke. Nothing else matters. Then there's this huge group - about 60 percent, I would say - that are attracted to whether this relates to them personally. That's the biggest part of the market right now. That's what I'm tapping into if I can do enough professions and occupations. Then there's 20 percent of the market that look just at the artwork. That's the 20 percent I can never get.
Q: How do you manage to churn out one strip a day?
A: Everybody wonders that. I believe people ask that question because they have a fantasy about the cartoon life, that you can slam out a few cartoons and go golf all day. It's like the greatest job in the world. I do one a day. Except when I'm traveling. But to do my best work, I can't do comics all day long. So I do it during my peak period, which is when I get up.
Q: Do you find it ironic that the people you make fun of are the ones buying your books in record numbers?
A: At this point, Adams gave a Dogbert-like snort.
LENGTH: Medium: 93 linesby CNB