Author's product rating: 
| Advantages: |
Very funny office - related humour |
| Disadvantages: |
Some repetition |
| Recommend to potential buyers: |
yes |
Scott Adams used to work for Pac Bell before decided that rather than sit in an office cubicle, it’d be far better to quit that job and make a living writing cartoons about office life. His Dilbert cartoons are popular in newspapers - featuring a poor geek-y engineer (Dilbert), his (generally incompetent) co-workers, his (even more moronic) boss and a variety of animals (Dogbert, Ratbert, etc). Perhaps it says something of their popularity that my spellchecker recognises ‘Dogbert’!
The Dilbert Principle (first published in 1996, and Sunday Times no. 1 best seller) declares itself to be “A cubicle’s-eye view of bosses, meetings, management fads and other workplace afflictions”. That pretty much sums it up really. It’s the funniest management book you’ll ever read!
The introduction begins with an acknowledgement from Scott Adams that no matter how absurd he makes scenarios, he always hears disgruntled office workers tell him it’s so true! Being a student myself, I only have very limited office experience (from the last two summers) but even I recognise some of it. I’d say you may appreciate the
books more if you do work in an office, but it certainly isn’t necessary. If you can relate to comedies like ‘The Office’ or that ginger office joker from ‘The Fast Show’ then there’s no reason why you can’t like Dilbert.
This book isn’t just a collection of cartoon strips though. It’s 336 pages of mostly text, illustrated with cartoons demonstrating points and the odd inserted email from real world employees telling us how their life is like Dilbert (e.g. the bosses buy laptops so people can work on the move, then fix them to desks to stop people stealing them!)
Divided into 26 chapters, the book covers everything office workers will no doubt know only too well about their environment - incompetent leaders, down-sizing, team-building exercises, budgeting and more. Some of it I’ve seen circulated on the internet (even ‘pretending to work’ tips from the mouth of David Brent from ‘The Office’)
Not having a plot or story as such, it’s the kind of book you can dip in and out of. I found it a relaxing thing to read a couple of chapters at a time on a quiet evening, and there’s no need to worry about losing the thread if you don’t come back to it for week. That said, I found it very funny and there was no chance I’d put it down for so long - it kept me going for a week or two of occasional browsing.
There’s not much more I can say really. If you’re familiar with, and like, Dilbert then I highly recommend this book. I found it very entertaining, because like the best comedy it takes the basically true to life, and twists it just the right amount. I’m tempted to quote so much, but I’ll just illustrate with a few of my favourite lol bits:
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Dogbert: Here’s my final report on your company
Dogbert: I’ve concluded that you’re doomed. You waste too much money on consultants.
Boss: You’re a consultant
Dogbert: Ironic isn’t it?
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On getting ‘buy in’: “You can’t accommodate a hundred different opinions, and you can’t ignore them. All you can do is provide people with the illusion that they participated in the decision. For some reason, that’s enough to make people happy*. This is that basis for all democracies” [p.83]
*The reason would be that people are idiots
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Boss: Our policy is to employ only the BEST technical professionals
Dilbert: Question. Isn’t it also our policy to base salaries on the industry AVERAGE?
Boss: Right. We like them bright but clueless
Wally: I feel sorry for people like that
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I found only three bad things about this book, and that’s stretching it a little:
1) it uses the slightly cheap Penguin Classic-style paper
2) some of the print is quite small, so it’s hard to make out some of the cartoons (speech bubbles or labels on things)
3) some of the cartoons I noticed were repeated to illustrate two points - this I found a bit of a shame, as I’d just seen them once and there they were again! Of course, that’s pretty rare, and most are repeated from newspapers anyway I assume, so if you’re a big Dilbert fan you’re likely to have seen many before anyway.
Cover price £4.99 [This is the 2000 Boxtree edition, which is on Amazon - though they seem rather keen on selling a more expensive 1997 edition with a different ISBN]. I picked up mine a few weeks ago in The Works for £1.99. Well worth it.
ISBN 0-7522-7220-9 (paperback)
If you are a Dilbert fan, you can get a free daily comic strip by email from www.dilbert.com
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