If you can't get your work done in the first 24 hours, work nights.
A pat on the back is only a few centimeters from a kick in the butt.
Don't be irreplaceable, if you can't be replaced, you can't be
promoted.
It doesn't matter what you do, it only matters what you say you've
done and what you're going to do.
After any salary raise, you will have less money at the end of the
month than you did before.
The more crap you put up with, the more crap you are going to get.
You can go anywhere you want if you look serious and carry a
clipboard.
Eat one live toad the first thing in the morning and nothing worse
will happen to you the rest of the day.
When the bosses talk about improving productivity, they are never
talking about themselves.
If at first you don't succeed, try again. Then quit. No use being a
damn fool about it.
There will always be beer cans rolling on the floor of your car when
the boss asks for a ride home from the office.
Keep your boss's boss off your boss's back.
Everything can be filed under "miscellaneous."
Never delay the ending of a meeting or the beginning of a cocktail
hour.
To err is human, to forgive is not our policy.
Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he/she is
supposed to be doing.
Important letters that contain no errors will develop errors in the
mail.
If you are good, you will be assigned all the work. If you are really
good, you will get out of it.
You are always doing something marginal when the boss drops by your
desk.
People who go to conferences are the ones who shouldn't.
If it wasn't for the last minute, nothing would get done.
At work, the authority of a person is inversely proportional to the
number of pens that person is carrying.
When you don't know what to do, walk fast and look worried.
Following the rules will not get the job done.
Getting the job done is no excuse for not following the rules.
When confronted by a difficult problem you can solve it more easily
by
reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
No matter how much you do, you never do enough.
The last person that quit or was fired will be held responsible for
everything that goes wrong.
Back to the top
I use a lot of "bad boss" themes in my syndicated cartoon
strip, "Dilbert." I'll never run out of material. I get a
hundred e-mail messages a day, mostly from people who are
complaining about their own clueless managers. Here are some
of my favorite stories, all allegedly true:
-- A vice president insists that the company's new
battery-powered product be equipped with a light that comes
on to tell you when the power is off.
-- An employee suggests setting priorities so they'll know
how to apply their limited resources. The manager's
response: "Why can't we concentrate our resources across the
board?"
-- A manager wants to find and fix software bugs more
quickly. He offers an incentive plan: $20 for each bug the
Quality Assurance people find and $20 for each bug the
programmers fix. (These are the same programmers who create
the bugs.) Result: An underground economy in "bugs" springs
up instantly. The plan is rethought after one employee nets
$1,700 the first week.
Stories like these prompted me to do the first annual
Dilbert Survey to find out what management practices were
most annoying to employees. The choices included the usual
suspects: Quality, Empowerment, Re-engineering and the like.
But the number-one vote-getter on this highly unscientific
survey was "Idiots Promoted to Management."
This seemed like a subtle change from the old concept
where capable workers were promoted until they reached their
level of incompetence -- the Peter Principle. Now,
apparently, the incompetent workers are promoted directly to
management without ever passing through the temporary
competence stage.
When I entered the workforce in 1979, the Peter Principle
described management pretty well. Now I think we'd all like
to return to those Golden Years when you had a boss who was
once good at something. I get all nostalgic when I think
about it. Back then, we all had hopes of being promoted
beyond our levels of competence. Every worker had a shot at
someday personally navigating the company into the tar pits
while reaping large bonuses and stock options. It was a time
when inflation meant everybody got an annual raise; a time
when we freely admitted that the customer didn't matter. It
was a time of joy.
We didn't appreciate it then, but the Peter Principle
always provided us with a boss who understood what we did
for a living. Granted, he made consistently bad decisions --
after all, he had no management skills. But at least they
were the informed decisions of a seasoned veteran from the
trenches.
Example:
Boss: "When I had your job I could drive a three-inch rod
through a metal casing with one motion. If you're late again
I'll do the same thing to your head."
Lately, however, the Peter Principle has given way to the
Dilbert Principle. The basic concept of the Dilbert
Principle is that the most ineffective workers are
systematically moved to the place where they can do the
least damage: management. This has not proved to be the
winning strategy that you might think.
Maybe we should learn something from nature. In the wild,
the weakest moose is hunted down and killed by Dingo dogs,
thus ensuring survival of the fittest. This is a harsh
system -- especially for the Dingo dogs that have to fly all
the way from Australia. But nature's process is a good one;
everybody agrees, except perhaps for the Dingo dogs and the
moose in question . . . and the flight attendants. But the
point is that we'd all be better off if the least competent
managers were being eaten by Dingo dogs instead of writing
mission statements.
It seems as if we've turned nature's rules upside down. We
systematically identify and promote the people who have the
least skills. The usual business rationalization for
promoting idiots (the Dilbert Principle in a nutshell) is
something along the lines of "Well, he can't write code, he
can't design a network, and he doesn't have any sales skill.
But he has very good hair . . ."
If nature started organizing itself like a modern
business, you'd see, for example, a band of mountain
gorillas led by an "alpha" squirrel. And it wouldn't be the
most skilled squirrel; it would be the squirrel nobody
wanted to hang around with.
I can see the other squirrels gathered around an old stump
saying stuff like "If I hear him say `I like nuts' one more
time, I'm going to kill him." The gorillas, overhearing
this conversation, lumber down from the mist and promote the
unpopular squirrel. The remaining squirrels are assigned to
Quality Teams as punishment.
You may be wondering if you fit the description of a
Dilbert Principle manager. Here's a little test:
1. Do you believe that anything you don't understand must
be easy to do?
2. Do you feel the need to explain in great detail why
"profit" is the difference between income and expense?
3. Do you think employees should schedule funerals only
during holidays?
4. Are the following words a form of communication or
gibberish:
"The Business Services Leadership Team will enhance the
organization in order to continue on the journey toward a
Market Facing Organization (MFO) model. To that end, we are
consolidating the Object Management for Business Services
into a cross strata team."
5. When people stare at you in disbelief, do you repeat
what you just said, only louder and slower?
Now give yourself one point for each question you answered
with the letter "B." If your score is greater than zero,
congratulations -- there are stock options in your future.
(The language in number 4 is from an actual company memo.)
---
Mr. Adams is the creator of Dilbert, which appears in 450
newspapers. He still works his day job at Pacific Bell.
Back to the top
This memo is to announce the development of a new plant-
wide software system. We are currently building a data
warehouse that will contain all plant manufacturing data. The
program is referred to as the "Manufacturing Information
Access Software System" (MIASS).
Next Monday at 9:00 there will be a meeting in which I will
show MIASS. We will continue to hold demonstrations
throughout the month so that all employees will have an
opportunity to get a good look at MIASS.
As for the status of the implementation of the program, I have
not addressed the networking aspects so currently only one
person can be in MIASS at a time. This should change as
MIASS expands.
Several people are using the program already and have come
to depend on it. Just this morning I walked into a
subordinate's office and was not surprised to find that he had
his nose buried in MIASS. I've noticed that some of the less
technical personnel are somewhat afraid of MIASS.
Just last week, when asked to enter some information into
the program, I had a secretary say to me "I'm a little nervous,
I've never put anything in MIASS before." I volunteered to help
her through her first time and when we were through she
admitted that it was relatively painless and she was actually
looking forward to doing it again. She went so far as to say
that after using SAP and Oracle, she was ready to kiss MIASS.
I know there are concerns over the virus that was found in
MIASS upon initial installation, but I am pleased to say the
virus has been eliminated and we were able to save MIASS.
In the future, however, protection will be required prior to
entering MIASS.
We planned this database to encompass all information
associated with the business. So as you begin using the
program, feel free to put anything you want into MIASS. As
MIASS grows larger, we envision a time when it will be
commonplace to walk by an office and see a manager hand a
paper to an employee and say "Here, stick this in MIASS."
This program has already demonstrated great benefit to the
company during recent OSHA and EPA audits. After requesting
certain historical data the agency representatives were
amazed at how quickly we provided the information. When
asked how the numbers could be retrieved so rapidly our
Environmental Manager proudly stated "Simple, I just pulled
them out of MIASS".
Back to the top
When the staff goes out after work, they talk about football or
basketball.
When Middle management gets together, they talk about tennis or
baseball.
When Top management gets together, they talk about golf.
Conclusion: The higher up you are in management, the smaller your
balls are.
Back to the top
Bob Smith, my assistant programmer, can always be found
hard at work in his cubicle. Bob works independently, without
wasting company time talking to colleagues. Bob never
thinks twice about assisting fellow employees, and he always
finishes given assignments on time. Often Bob takes extended
measures to complete his work, sometimes skipping coffee
breaks. Bob is a dedicated individual who has absolutely no
vanity in spite of his high accomplishments and profound
knowledge in his field. I firmly believe that Bob can be
classed as a high-calibre employee, the type which cannot
dispensed with. Consequently, I duly recommend that Bob be
promoted to executive management, and a proposal will be
sent away as soon as possible.
Sd/-
Project Leader
-------------------------------------------------------------------
A MEMO WAS SOON SENT FOLLOWING THE LETTER:
That stupid idiot was reading over my shoulder when I wrote the
report sent to you earlier today. Kindly read only the
alternative lines 1, 3, 5, 7, ... for my true assessment of him.
Regards,
Sd/-
Project Leader
Back to the top