The Trouble with Dilbert: How Corporate Culture Gets the Last Laugh (Paperback)

Well, if anyone read's Dilbert for a while and stays in their cubicle as a corporate drone, I can only say there was no hope for them anyway. It would be like reading `The Band Played On' and deciding it would be a jolly idea to get AIDS.

Once you get over the bizzareness of that argument, the secondary ones prove equally entertaining.

Scott Adams makes lots of money. Naked envy isn't pleasent, especially from someone who makes sure we know how many syndicated columns and books he has written. Anyone want to bet he does them for nothing?

Managers and executives like Dilbert, so it can't be attacking them... Many engineers _love_ Dilbert, does anyone want to assert Dilbert doesn't attack engineers?

There's a chapter where he has clearly run out of things to say about Dilbert, so he rants about Wired magazine for a while. This from somoene who accuses Adams of picking easy targets.

The tone is Dogbert meets undergraduate politics. Solomon clearly thinks he's much cleverer than us to have uncovered this plot by the evil capitalists. He can't spot irony when it's been layed on with a trowel.

Someone should give him some Hothead Paisan to read, the resulting book about how those of us who like it must all want to be emotionally damaged lesbian psychopaths really _would_ be worth reading.

"Dilbert" IS just a cartoon. Any thinking person knows not to take it seriously. It is funny because it contains situations that its readers have experienced -- like the "Bohemian Rhapsody" scene in "Wayne's World," where we suddenly realize how silly we must have looked banging our heads to Queen. It's the humor of the familiar, as opposed to the humor of the inherently absurd.

Solomon's basic premise is essentially that corporate bigwigs are sooooo much smarter and more devious than us that, without his help, we'd never notice if they tried to pull something, as long as they remember to include a Dilbert strip or two to make the bitter pill easier to swallow. My premise, on the other hand, is that anyone who fails to notice they're being shafted because they've been distracted by a CARTOON richly deserves whatever they get. It is never your employer's job to watch out for you; it is YOUR job to watch out for you.

I don't think I'm ever going to be able to stand to read a Tom Tomorrow strip again, either. Not that "This Modern World" doesn't have its own agenda; I mean, the guy voted for Ralph Nader in the last election.

The book comes across like a bad term paper written by a student who's picked the wrong hypothesis and now grasping at threads and straws to support his theory, quoting everyone from Ralph Nader to Jimi Hendrix.

Portions of the book take perfectly logical comments made by Scott Adams in the course of interviews and try to sensationalize them. For example if a group of corporate employees is no longer needed or doing unnecessary tasks Scott Adams would support "downsizing" in that case. It would appear that the authors believe that in this case the employees should still be kept on and probably in the same (unneeded) capacity too. Sensational heading for this topic "Dilbert's creator, Scott Adams, actually favors downsizing." At other times the author takes tongue and cheek comments made by Adams way to seriously.

In other sections of the book the author comes across as jealous and whiny. It would appear that the author believes that cartoonists shouldn't license their work to appear on magnets, mugs or the like, nor horror of horrors corporate handbooks (Xerox). Corporations should allow their employees to read anti-company material on company time and if they don't Dilbert should take up the worker's cause (I refer here to the fact that Intel blocked access to an anti-Intel web site on their corporate network - page 32-33).

I'm reminded of a story told by author Wayne Dyer: when he was in college as part of a test he was asked to read and interpret a poem. He did so, but his professor told him his interpretation was incorrect.

Later that semester Dyer had the good fortune to run into the poet who had written that poem a decade or two ago. Dyer told him what had happened and the poet in turn told Dyer that his intrepretation was right on the mark.

Dyer, all excited went to see the professor and mentioned meeting the poet and what the poet had said. The professor's comment? "He's wrong. He doesn't know how to interpret his own poetry either."

I guess if you become successful enough you'll be hit by a frivolous lawsuit or in this case a frivilous book. It's very rare that I feel like purchasing a book was a waste of my money - but I feel this book was both a waste of my time and my money.