Scott Adams warned us about bad bosses—then we laughed it off

Sadly, it was for all the wrong reasons.

The comic strip, which appeared in thousands of newspapers around the world, was good for a laugh and a reliable icebreaker at the company do. But its real message—of systemic, institutional incompetence—was lost amid the mirth and chuckles. Much like Shakespeare’s fools, who spoke truth to power under the guise of nonsense, Dilbert offered profound insights that went unheeded by a corporate class that preferred to treat the comic as a mascot rather than a mirror.

The 1980s and 1990s marked the high tide of corporate jargon and middle-management bloat. Driven by dapper young men and women fresh out of business schools—where they learned more about management than about business—companies gleefully transformed themselves into bureaucratic labyrinths. For Adams, fresh from a nine-year stint at Pacific Bell (and a previous role at Crocker National Bank), this was fertile ground for caricature.

Employing a style of minimalist, almost primitive line work, Adams took aim at the foibles and pretensions passing for corporate life. Unlike the detailed, frantic energy of Mort Walker’s Beetle Bailey or the soft-edged whimsy of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, Adams used a flat, deadpan aesthetic that mirrored the sterile environment of the office.

His humour was unsparing and cynically observant. Each week, he lashed out at another of the lunacies that peppered the workday. The Dilbert Principle—a satirical twist on the Peter Principle—was succinctly described as “a cubicle’s eye view of bosses, meetings, management fads and other workplace afflictions." It argued that the least competent people are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management.

Today, we are familiar with the futility of tiresome mission statements, change initiatives, status reports on status reports, and synergistic realignments. But when Adams first drew attention to them through his trademark speech balloons, it felt almost blasphemous. After all, each mantra had a management guru behind it, a consulting firm fronting it, and a business leader embracing it.

Adams was particularly surgical in his deconstruction of the era's biggest management fads. He famously quipped that "the goal of TQM is to find the best way to do things that shouldn't be done at all." He also skewered Business Process Reengineering (BPR), another buzzword of the 1990s, showing how "streamlining" usually just meant firing the people who knew how to do the work, leaving the pointy-haired bosses to manage the resulting vacuum.

Acronyms were another Adams pick and he dubbed them the corporate bozo’s great ally. Here’s a little gem from The Dilbert Principle:

Boss: What was your contribution to the project?

You: Mostly QA. I was also an SME for the BUs.

Boss: Um… okay. Excellent work.

That "um" was significantly placed, revealing a truth about companies that is widely known but rarely conceded: most bosses don’t have a clue!

Yes, there was stereotyping in his work, none more so than in the character of Asok, the Indian nerd with an IQ of 240, routinely forced to do the work of three people while being denied basic workplace comforts. But Adams wasn’t merely picking on Silicon Valley’s most visible immigrant community. His world was populated by a menagerie of archetypes, each a mirror image of real-life office dwellers.

Thus, he gave us Dogbert, Dilbert’s pet dog and a cynical, world-conquering consultant who viewed all humans as "in-duh-viduals" to be exploited, and Alice, the high-performing, perpetually stressed engineer whose "hair of fire" signalled the raw fury of the competent. These were balanced by Wally, the shameless slacker who had mastered the art of looking busy while doing absolutely nothing but carrying a coffee cup, and the sinister Catbert, the evil director of human resources who derived a literal feline joy from employee suffering. At the centre of this chaos stood the pointy-haired boss, who walked the halls using humiliation and management by wandering around as his primary tools.

Before controversy related to his 2023 comments on racial demographics spoilt his reputation and consigned him to the rogues' gallery of right-wing pundits, Scott Adams was a truly influential voice. His books, such as The Dilbert Principle, spent 43 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. At his peak, Dilbert was published in 2,000 newspapers across 65 countries.

Dilbert found a strange resonance in India, which, following the 1991 reforms, was witnessing an explosion of Western-style corporatese. As Indian IT hubs mirrored the Silicon Valley cubicle farms, the same Indian business publications which carried the comic strip reported earnestly on delayering, strategic intent, and kaizen.

Adams may have ended his career in a cloud of self-inflicted controversy, but for three decades, he was the only man who truly explained the spiritual rot of the modern workplace while exposing the hollow logic that allows a company to fire its most talented workers to pay for a visioning retreat.