That’s Why They Call It Work

He is the man who gave lowly cubicle nerds a reason for being. Or is it the other way around?

At any rate, cartoonist Scott Adams has concocted a lucrative empire out of the drab lives of workaday drones and, simultaneously, brought joy to the very souls whose workplace travails he sends up on a daily basis with “Dilbert.”

The fastest-growing cartoon strip in syndication, “Dilbert” reaches 150 million people in 65 countries. It has spawned a half-hour comedy on television and four best-selling business books, not to mention dolls, sweatshirts, ties and a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor (Dilbert’s World--Totally Nuts).

Adams, a former Pacific Bell systems engineer, knows whereof he writes. He penned his first Dilbertian doodles while sitting in pointless corporate meetings. His tales of Catbert, the evil human resources director; Alice; Wally; and the no-name, pointy-haired Boss speak to workers everywhere. Hundreds of them send daily e-mail fodder to Adams chronicling the absurdities they endure, ensuring that Dilbert will thrive well into the new millennium.

Q: Is there any reason to think that managers in the future will be smarter about how they treat people?

A: Evolution doesn’t work that quickly, and there’s still evidence that the smart people will continue working for themselves. Managers will get dumber until they can no longer find their way to work.

Q: Why don’t people have the confidence to truly lead?

A: Leadership is by definition getting people to do something they know is not in their best interest. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have to ask them to do it. So that limits the [management] pool to those who are evil.

Q: “Evil” is a strong word. Elaborate on that.

A: The only other jobs that you can think of that involve forcing people to do what they don’t want to do are prison guards, taxidermists and possibly serial killers.

Q: What are the challenges for a human resources person in a society made up mostly of “knowledge workers”?

A: Not to get downsized. If everybody figures out what they do for a living, their jobs will disappear. A lot of what passes for HR is sitting around developing policies that can only annoy. Their work doesn’t go to the bottom line.

I was surprised when I introduced Catbert, the evil HR director, as a character. I thought I’d get flamed by HR people, but apparently they’ve adopted him as their mascot. The quote from him that is most telling is when he said to an employee, “There’s a lot of diversity in this company, and the longer you work here di-verse it gets.”

Q: What changes do you foresee in the workplace of the future?

A: The big friction will be employees who want to escape detection about what they’re doing with their day, yet technology will [enable employers to] have cameras everywhere, to monitor their surfing of the Internet and to monitor their badges, a technology that I think will be rolled out soon with some cover story about how bosses want to be able to find you in an emergency.

Q: Are we talking more drudgery, more cubicles, more numbing repetition?

A: I think more drudgery is probably in our future. People seem to be dealing with that by job-hopping every two years. There’s a desperate need to get a different kind of drudgery. The job market will remain good, so people will hop like crazy, like moths to lightbulbs, trying to get something unattainable.

When you come right down to it, if your job were enjoyable, they wouldn’t have to pay you to do it. People would stand in line to do it. They’ve removed most of the physical pain, except the headache of listening to your co-worker all day. But they can’t get rid of the psychological pain or nobody would pay you to do your job and capitalism would break down.

Q: Will workers become more fulfilled or less fulfilled in the future?

A: The great thing about the Internet, if you’re not already being monitored, is that you can turn your cubicle into a virtual gambling casino. You can do day trading, peep shows, everything except beverages, and some people are moving little refrigerators in.

Short term, as a result, workers will be more fulfilled because they’re in Vegas every day. Long term, bosses will figure out how to monitor this. I’m expecting them to have monitors on parts of your body to see if you’re aroused. They possibly will deal with that by flashing images of your boss on the computer screen or by using electrical shocks, I’m not sure which.

Q: What are some of the characteristics a leader of the future will have?

A: Stupidity will have to be built in. They’ll have to want to work harder for less money than they would make doing other things. The real reason managers will be hard to find is you can make more money doing other stuff. So you’ll get the people who don’t know that work and pay are somehow related.

Q: Will workers of the future have a chance to voice their opinions and get their ideas across, or will they just be stymied?

A: The whole reason companies squash innovation is that the alternative would be chaos. Most employees are idiots too. The only thing worse than a bad idea is thousands of them. You can’t unleash them and keep the company intact. So you squash the creativity as brutally as you can.

Q: In recent decades we have seen the rise and usually the fall of various management fads: management by objective, management by walking around, total quality management, re-engineering. What will be the big management fad of the future?

A: Well, knowledge management is the biggest thing. Like all the other buzzwords, it will be destroyed by overinterpretation. At some point, there was a pretty clean definition. Now it means if you know something, you’re knowledge-managing. It will probably die under its own weight.

Part of the trend in the future is the death of trends. About the time Dilbert started quite publicly skewering a lot of management fads, the management book business went right to hell. [Since then,] you haven’t seen too many huge new management fads.

It’s the mockability factor. People know now if they’re just inventing new words for stuff, they’re opening themselves up to be mocked.

Q: What about Y2K? Is it a real problem for managers?

A: I would hate to be the one company that wasn’t ready. In terms of the world, it will be a minor blip that will be quickly forgotten. But if you happen to be the blip, you’ll be really embarrassed. It gets harder and harder to claim you didn’t know.

It turns out there’s talk among lawyers that the Dilbert Date will become the date of precedent in court cases, when companies should have known about the potential problem. The Dilbert Date is the date “Y2K” first appeared in the cartoon.

Q: For the record, when was that?

A: Sept. 17, 1996.

Q: What big workplace shifts do you foresee?

A: Probably only five years ago if you called some professional and you heard a baby crying in the background, you thought, “Oh no, this is somebody working out of the house,” and you’d immediately think less of that person. Today if that same thing happens you’re more likely to feel empathy, like, “Wow, this person doesn’t need a company to back him.” And you certainly don’t think anything less of their capabilities.

This is important along with another fact: When downsizing was happening big-time in the early to mid-1990s, it was legitimate to be afraid of it because not that many people had experienced it. I saw some statistics recently, something like 80% of managers who lost jobs to downsizing ended up fairly soon with as good or better a salary. What you have is an entire downsized generation who experienced it personally or knew many who did. They came out better.

So now any control that managers might think they have--with the threat, “I’m going to fire you”--doesn’t exist because working at home and having kids cry in the background doesn’t hurt your career. So the balance of power has swung clearly back to the employee side. Barring another big change, it’s going to be a fun time to be an employee.

Here’s the other trend. You know how people are more likely to complain to me than to anybody on Earth? There has been a huge change in the last three years. Complaining has trailed off to simple ironies. They’re sending them to me only because they think something is funny. Everybody knows they could get a better job if they just got off their ass. They can’t blame anybody else anymore.

So something is wrong with them, not the job. Five years ago, you could legitimately say the job was bad and it wasn’t your fault.

Employees have learned that they need to be their own employer. They have to educate themselves. Everybody who says the business cycle has to go boom and bust is ignoring that something is changing at the core.

We’re smarter about how to make an economy work. We now know what the problem is and we can usually fix it. In the U.S., there will be a continuous will to find the solution. It is entirely possible that [good economic times] will go on forever. It’s entirely possible you are seeing the worst times you’ll ever see.