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Reference
Adams, S. (1996). The Dilbert principle: A cubicle's-eye view of bosses, meetings, management fads and other workplace afflictions. Pan Macmillan. https://archive.org/details/dilbertprinciple00adam/page/n5/mode/2up
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https://www.youtube.com/@weekendresearcher
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🎙️ Welcome to Revise and Resubmit, and this is our episode series, Weekend Classics 📚✨
Some books don’t just age. They lurk. They sit on the shelf like a file you never closed, waiting for the day you walk back into an office, or into your own memory of one, and hear that familiar sound: a meeting beginning for no reason anyone can clearly explain. And today’s book is exactly that kind of companion. Not comforting. Not polite. Just eerily accurate in a way that makes you laugh first, and then stare at the ceiling for a second longer than you meant to.
I’m talking about The Dilbert Principle by Scott Raymond Adams, published in 1996 by Harper Business. If you’ve ever watched competence get punished with more work while confusion gets rewarded with a bigger cabin, this book doesn’t so much explain it as name the thing you’ve been living inside. Adams takes the old idea of the Peter Principle and gives it a darker little grin: companies, he argues, tend to promote the least capable into management, not because it helps, but because it keeps them from damaging actual productivity. 🧩📉
What makes it hit is not just the jokes. It’s the cubicle’s-eye view. The sense that modern work can be a kind of theatre where jargon stands in for meaning, documents stand in for decisions, and the calendar fills up like a sink with a slow leak. You get comic strips, yes, but you also get prose that feels like somebody finally admitted the quiet part out loud. 😅🗂️
And Scott Adams could admit it because he’d lived it. Before Dilbert became a cultural shorthand for corporate absurdity, Adams worked in corporate roles, close to telecommunications engineers, moving through places like Crocker National Bank and Pacific Bell. He was trained in the language of systems, productivity, and management. He also woke up early, worked relentlessly, and drew his way out, one panel at a time, until the world started writing back. There’s something almost cinematic about that, the ordinary worker sending out a signal from the fluorescent-lit middle, and watching it echo across hundreds of newspapers. 🎨🕰️
So this weekend, I’m revisiting The Dilbert Principle not just as satire, but as a time capsule. A funny one. A sharp one. The kind that reminds you the workplace is never only about work. It’s about human irrationality dressed up as process. It’s about status masquerading as strategy. It’s about the strange comfort of realizing you were not imagining it. 👔🔍
If you’re listening and you like these deep dives into books that still have teeth, please subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, and also on YouTube at Weekend Researcher 🎧📺. You can also find this show on Amazon Prime Music and Apple Podcast 🌍🎙️
And with gratitude, thank you to Scott Adams and Harper Business for this enduring, unsettlingly familiar classic.
Now tell me, when you look at your own workplace, do you see a system designed for competence, or one designed to hide incompetence in plain sight? 🤔📌
