Years ago in Cleveland I saw the musical "How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying," mail clerk J. Pierpont Finch's hilarious romp up the corporate ladder. I remember using that experience as a take-off point for a sermon on business ethics - with the president and vice-president of the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce in the congregation. I was young and foolhardy then. Now I am old and foolhardy - as once again I attempt to enter a world in which I have had little experience, but about which I have many opinions.
Cartoonist Scott Adams in his strip Dilbert has updated "how to succeed" and created a primer on how not to succeed in business and in life. The Dilbert Principle is that "the most ineffective people are moved to the place where they can do the least amount of damage: management."
In Gilbert on Dilbert I suggest instead the Gilbert Principle - that our most important real life task is management - the management of meaning in our lives.
I am convinced that good cartoonists, as few others, have their pulse on the Zeitgeist - the spirit of the times.
Scott Adams' cartoon critique of management has become the talk of the town. Dilbert’s boss comes in for most abuse. For example, Adams parodies a management buzz word, reengineering, about which the boss says, "Everybody's doing it. We'd better jump under the bandwagon before the train leaves the station." Mixed metaphors are always dangerous.
Have you ever written a mission statement? Been there, done that. In another strip he satirizes the omnipresent mission statement, which he defines as "a long awkward sentence that demonstrates management’s inability to think clearly." The Boss says, "I took a crack at writing a ‘mission statement’ for our group.
‘We enhance stockholder value through strategic business initiatives by empowered employees working new team paradigms.’"
Dilbert: "Do you ever just marvel at the fact we get paid to do this?"
The Boss: "Did anybody bring donuts?"
One of Adams’ E-mail correspondents demonstrated the observation that Dilbert is more documentary than satire. "My boss actually said to me ‘Let’s bubble back up to the surface and smell the numbers.’ I had no idea what it meant." As Adams says, "No matter how absurd I try to make the comic strip, I can't stay ahead of what people are experiencing in the workplace."
Though he was fired from his job in corporate America, Adams personally thinks that corporate downsizing often does make the workplace more efficient - fewer workers means less time to waste on idiotic pursuits like vision statements, meetings and reorganizations - he nonetheless makes that phenomenon the target of many of his barbs.
One strip begins with a boss announcing he will be using humor to ease tensions caused by trimming the work force.
'I've decided to use humor in the workplace. Experts say humor eases tension which is important in times when the workforce is being trimmed. "Knock, knock," says the boss.
"Who’s there?" asks a hapless worker.
"Not you anymore," responds the grinning boss.
But Adams’ cynicism about human nature does not stop with the boss. Co-workers also seem to be caught up in this absurd work culture. A group of workers gather around another’s desk. One says, "We’re sorry to hear you’re getting laid off, Bruce. We calculated that if ten of your friends here took ten percent pay cuts, then the company can keep you."
Bruce: "Gosh! You’d do that for me?"
"No, we’re here to look at your office furniture."
What is the gospel according to Dilbert? There are times when Scott Adams becomes a prophet, skewering perceived injustice, mocking dehumanizing practices that are too close to reality for comfort. He writes about a familiar corporate mantra: "‘Employees are our most valuable asset.’ On the surface this statement seems to be at odds with the fact that companies are treating their "most valuable assets" the same way a leaf blower treats leaves. How can this apparent contradiction be explained?"
He treats this issue in a cartoon in which the boss admits he was mistaken that "employees are our most valuable asset." Actually, he explains, "they’re ninth." "Eighth place?" someone asks. "Carbon paper," says the boss.
After a particular "downsizing" there were unused work cubicles which the company decided to hire Dogbert Construction to retrofit them and rent them out to the state as a prison.
Dilbert: "I don’t think it’s fair to put convicts in our spare cubicles."
Dogbert: "Don’t be such a bigot. These people have made one little mistake. Otherwise, they’re just like employees."
Dilbert: "I think there are a few differences."
Dogbert: "Yeah, their health care is better."
How are we to assess Adams? Is he prophet or embittered employee getting back at his former bosses? I think Adams is no prophet but a social critic. He has a totally cynical view of human nature. His characters are not suffering from paranoia, people are out to get them - from the boss to the stockholders to their fellow-workers. These characters are totally self-interested, with no discernible trace of altruism.
One reporter asked him, "Are you as cynical as you seem?" "Yes. I don’t think what I’m doing is based on rage, but I’m terribly amused by the absurd.
The absurdity stands out more in a business setting because there’s an expectation that people will act rationally. But people aren’t rational."
Whether or not Dilbert is true to life, it is close enough that millions of people read it daily. In one survey of workers indicate that 87% say their workplace is a "pleasant environment," but Adams responds, "If you’re in an absurd situation and you’re not changing it, then you define it as being OK."
And it is true that more than 70% of workers report stress on the job, suggesting that there may well be a kind of suppressed rage in America’s workplaces. Dilbert's problem is that he is totally dehumanized by his work environment. Certainly my conversations with many of you indicate that working isn’t what it used to be - that work has become an ordeal - that it is robbing people not only of their time, but also of their human dignity.
For such people Dilbert is a pleasant catharsis. But Adams has been roundly criticized by more radical cartoonists as being "on the side of the ruling class," betraying "millions of insecure and beleaguered office workers" who consider him their champion. It is "not very radical commentary to say ‘Boy, aren’t bosses dumb.’ There’s no analysis, even in a goofy way, of why bosses act the way they do.
It’s ‘Boy is my boss dumb,’ but not ‘Boy, is this huge company stupid for doing this merger and laying off half its employees and devastating the local economy and shipping the jobs to Mexico or Indonesia.’ Criticizing stupid bosses without putting them in context is like complaining because it gets dark at night without understanding that the earth revolves around the sun. It’s a really limited view. It doesn’t go anywhere. It’s just a safety valve."
I confess I am somewhat suspicious of Adams' credentials as the prophet of the workplace. I withhold that status from anyone who in critiquing the corporation has become one, anyone who proudly admits he has always wanted "to make as much money as I could....If you can write on it, if it will hold a label, it’s a prime target for licensing. You can’t get to overexposure without getting to filthy rich first."
What is disturbing in Dilbert is the relative equanimity with which the office workers accept their plight. Passivity is their chief character trait. They seem to be automatons who do not so much live in, as simply respond to, their environment.
One wonders if painting this humorous picture of their ineptitude, their shallowness of life, their willingness to go along with absurdity, is a step on the way to ending the insanity. Or does it simply help them deal with it by laughing at it?
After all, CEO’s and management consultants post the cartoons on their office bulletin boards - how penetrating can this critique be if the targets simply divert the satirical arrows with a laugh? Adams says they always think he's pointing the finger at somebody else. Does Dilbert merely co-opt workers who ought to be struggling to humanize their work environment instead of making the best of their dehumanization?
Adams seems to be ambivalent on his role. On the one hand he defends himself by saying "anything which can be mocked will not last...." but who is to say it won’t last? And, on the other, he says, "My goal is not to change the world. My goal is to make a few bucks and hope you laugh in the process." He is hoisted on the petard of his own cynicism.
What is going to stop our thoughtless, dangerous, headlong dash into the 21st century in which work once more becomes drudgery - albeit a high tech one - a drudgery which increasingly consumes our lives.
In the mid-1990’s the Apple Macintosh development team wore T shirts proclaiming "90 hours a week and loving it!" Is that the kind of brave new world we want? We seem caught up in a momentum about which many of us complain, but about which we seem to be able to do little or nothing. We accept the new oppression with nary a critical word - so fearful are we for our jobs.
Now the cartoonist, of course, is not really supposed to be a social revolutionary, but is Adams helping sustain a workplace environment which so often saps the human spirit by merely encouraging us to laugh at it?
Or is he launching a long-overdue conversation about the place of work in human life? Is Adams helping or hindering our headlong dash into the brave new world where we live faster and faster, with more and more, for less and less meaning?
In 1987 social critic Jeremy Rifkin uttered these prophetic words:
"We have quickened the pace of life only to become less patient. We have become more organized but less spontaneous, less joyful. We are better prepared to act on the future but less able to enjoy the present and reflect on the past."
Is that to be the culmination of our evolution as spiritual creatures? That our work will suck the life force from us, as it did for Scott Adams. Are you happy in your work? Does it add meaning to your life? If so, good. If not, what are you, what can you, do about it?
The Dilbert solution of supine acquiescence in absurdity is a spiritually fatal position. It is a study in how not to succeed in the business of life. Adams offers us no hope. The Gilbert principle is that we need to manage the meaning of our lives in the workplace - for it is there, increasingly, that humanity’s fate is being decided. It would not be not enough for me to endure the absurdity of the workplace, to find a humorous "haven in a heartless world." It is our task to make that world less heartless.
Sources:
Business Week, 5/27/96, 46.
U.S. News and World Report, 4/22/96, 77.
Fortune, 5/13/96, pp. 99-110.
Newsweek, 8/12/96, pp. 52-57.
Windows, 5/95, reprinted in Utne Reader, 7-8/95, 88-9.
Salon - on line
USA Weekend, 7/26-28/96, 10, and 3/21-23/97, 18.
Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, 2/23/97, 1E.
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