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I stories of managerial blunders, oversights, and just plain weird behavior. After more than a decade of drawing "Dilbert," Adams has t could be argued that there has not been a corporate foible, laughable corporate policy, or doomed corporate idea that hasn't found its way into a "Dilbert" cartoon. After all, Scott Adams, its creator, gets his ideas straight from the front lines. Thousands of readers send him their heard many stories that prove that business can, indeed, be weirder than fiction. Like the one about the company that purchased laptop computers so that its employees could work more easily while on business trips. Management then had the laptops permanently mounted to employees' desks to prevent theft. Or the one about the company that routinely ignored employees' suggestions for improving operations. Instead, the president hired a troubleshooting consultant, who asked the employees for their suggestions. The consultant then gave those suggestions to the president, who then promptly put them into practice. It's the kind of stuff you just can't make up, Adams says. Until he left his job to work on "Dilbert" full-time, Adams, too, was on a corporate track. After earning his bach- elor's degree in economics from Hartwick College in New York in 1979, he went to work for Crocker National Bank in San Francisco from 1979 to 1986, and for Pacific Bell in San Ramon, California, from 1989 to 1995. He earned his MBA, via evening classes, from University of California-Berkeley in 1986, with the full intention of climbing the corporate ladder. But a strange thing happened on his way to a promotion. ing that "Dilbert" simply reflects the often laughable exchanges that occur between managers and their employees. In such a world, Adams has found that the trick to succeed- ing in business often comes down to persistence and plain dumb luck. Once managers realize that, he says, they're in the position to achieve anything. You were in corporate America for quite a few years before you entered the MBA program at UC-Berkeley. What made you decide to get your MBA? Well, at the time I was still at Crocker Bank and had no thought of cartooning. I made the observation that people who had MBAs from good schools got ahead, people who didn't have them got ahead much more slowly. I thought I was going to become a captain of industry, so I decided it would be good for my career. What did you take from the experience? Getting my MBA was probably the hardest, most rewarding, and most useful thing I've ever done—and I'm not saying that just because I think you might like to hear it! But I found myself in accounting classes, for example, with people who already were CPAs. Needless to say, I was not the head of the class. In my first quarter, I distinctly remember sitting in my In the late 1980s, Adams imagined a rather dorky-but-intelli- gent engineer named Dilbert, who was trapped in a cubicle working for an unnamed tech company. Dilbert and his coterie of co-workers are tormented by the bottom-line blindness of accounting, the cruelty of human resources, the vacuity of marketing, and, above all, the clueless whims of management, personi- fied by a nameless "pointy-haired" boss. With such an unflattering view of business, Adams is often by Tricia Bisoux photo by Timothy Archibald deemed an "anti-management guru." But he has struck a powerful chord in the business world. Since the strip began in 1989, its popularity has exploded. "Dilbert" now runs in more than 2,000 newspapers worldwide. The "anti-management guru" label is a misnomer, Adams accounting class after we had taken a test. Before the professor handed out our tests, he put the distribution of grades up on the board, so he showed how many people got As, how many people got Bs. There was one person who had the lowest grade. I remember sitting there thinking, wow, that poor bastard, how embarrassing to be that one guy at the bottom! There weren't even two people at the bottom, just one! Well, he handed the tests back, and I was that guy. And I remained at the bottom of that list until I figured out just how much work was required to get an MBA and I started doing it. I know that I came out of the MBA program believes. As co-owner of two restaurants in the California area (Stacey's Cafe in Pleasanton, California, and Stacey's at Water ford in Dublin) and the CEO of Scott Adams Foods, manufacturer of a nutrition-packed burrito, Adams is a busi- nessman himself. But the absurdity is out there, he says, not- similar educational experience, the thing I'm amazed at is that they don't know what they don't know. So they don't know they're missing anything. That's the scary thing. I didn't know that I was missing anything. And frankly, I didn't go to school to learn; I went to school to get a degree so that peo- ple would think I was smart, but I wouldn't actually have to be smart. My biggest surprise was that I actually took away from that experience skills so valuable that, for me, they made the difference between success and not success. In fact, if you ask the right question, I'll tell you why the MBA is the only reason that "Dilbert" has been successful. much, much better prepared to do anything. And when I encounter people who have not had a BizEd NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 17