The Business World According To Dilbert -- Popular `Managerial Guide' Tickles Creator Scott Adams

BERKELEY, Calif. - "Dilbert" creator Scott Adams is pleased, but not too surprised, that his management-tweaking books are raking in the kind of sales once reserved for weighty tomes on how to succeed in business.

"There's a fairly obvious reason," he says dryly. "For every person who's a manager and wants to know how to manage people, there are 10 people who are being managed and would like to figure out how to make it stop."

"You have a choice of appealing to the one or to the 10, and I simply choose the 10," he concludes, adding humbly, "I have to confess, I only know that after the fact."

Not that managers aren't welcome to buy Dilbert books, too, Adams is quick to point out.

"It turns out that the beauty of my approach, also totally accidental . . . is that everyone thinks I'm talking about their boss," he says. "They're pretty sure they're not doing that stuff, but their boss is certainly doing it to them."

The title character, an odd little fellow with a celery-top head, opaque glasses, no mouth and a gravity-defying tie, was the descendant of doodles a bored Adams drew in business meetings.

In strip after strip, Dilbert takes potshots at despots and grills the sacred cows of business to a crisp.

For instance, one strip begins with a manager announcing he will be using humor to ease tensions caused by trimming the work force.

"Knock, knock," says the manager. "Who's there?" asks a hapless worker. "Not you anymore," responds the grinning boss.

Adams' books have peppered the best-seller lists. He had three books - "The Dilbert Principle," "Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook" and "Telling it Like it Isn't" - on one New York Times business bestseller list during January. And he's often on the regular bestseller list too.

What's the secret to Adams' success?

"I think he's extraordinarily skillful at tapping the kind of dissatisfaction and stupidity that most American workers experience in the workplace," says Robert Cole, business professor at the University of California-Berkeley. "He's developed a real knack."

Adams, 39, came by his insight into the American workplace the old-fashioned way - he worked, first in a bank, then at Pacific Bell.

Early attempts to break into cartooning failed. He was rejected by the Famous Artists School at age 11 - "They said you had to be at least 12 years old to be a famous artist" - and got a crop of rejection letters when he tried again at age 29.

But a year later, a cartoonist he'd contacted for advice on how to break into the tough field wrote him a follow-up letter to make sure he hadn't given up.

In fact, Adams had. But the letter was an impetus to try again, resulting in a contract with United Media in 1988 for "Dilbert."

"Dilbert" now appears in 1,400 papers in 35 countries.

In 1993, "Dilbert" went somewhere no syndicated strip had gone before when Adams started printing his e-mail address and inviting readers to write.

They did, some commenting on Dilbert's adventures, some offering new anecdotes of nitwit management and others just venting steam.

"A lot of people use me as therapy. Free therapy," says Adams, who gets about 350 e-mails a day.

For several years, Adams kept his day job at Pac Bell, drawing the strip in his spare time.

But in 1995 he was nudged into full-time entrepreneurship when a new boss took him up on a longstanding offer to resign if management felt his costs exceeded his benefits to the company. Adams says as far as he knows, "Dilbert" had nothing to do with it.

The change turned out to be a lot less traumatic than Adams had imagined. "It was like, `It's gone' the minute you walked out."

These days he works from 6 a.m. to midnight in the east San Francisco Bay Area house he shares with a girlfriend and two cats. Along with his daily strips and a new book, he's working on a pilot script for a live-action Dilbert sitcom for the Fox network.

He also has an Internet site, the Dilbert Zone, that gets thousands of visitors each day. Cole sees Adams as a "classic example . . . of someone who's learned to use the Internet to build his business."

But Cole defends the establishment a bit, saying Adams' world reflects the frustrations but not the successes of the workplace.

Still, Cole uses Dilbert cartoons in his classes because "sometimes he goes right to the heart of an issue."

Back at the drawing board, Adams has a theory that "anything which can be mocked will not last," and he also believes that "the first step toward changing anything is saying what the heck is wrong with the thing you've got."

But he's far from a crusader.

"My goal is not to change the world," he says. "My goal is to make a few bucks and hope you laugh in the process."