Scott Adams Turns Cubical Mysery Into a Career

May 4, 2001 -- -- The stock market's sinking, unemployment is on the rise, and Scott Adams, America's No. 1 peddler of workplace misery, just keeps laughing.

The author of Dilbert — the cartoon hero of the office cubicle — says he has everything to gain when the economy hits a pothole. After all, a decade ago, when another President Bush was struggling on the domestic front, Adams single-handedly turned the word "corporate downsizing" into a punch line.

"Whenever the economy turns south I hear the cash register go 'Ca-Tching, Ca-Tching'," Adams says. "Whenever there is an unhappy employee, they will be feeding me information for Dilbert."

Wall Street's unprecedented bull run forced Adams to switch gears in the late 1990s. How can you write comic strips about your nincompoop boss in the good times — when workers are no longer trapped in their jobs?

Luckily for Adams, even in good times, work still sucked. Americans still needed Dilbert. "The Dilbert principle still applies. The dumbest people are promoted to management because competent people are needed to do the real work," he says.

"But with people changing jobs more frequently, and the world growing more complicated, you have dumber and dumber people doing harder and harder things — so for me, thank God, the workplace is still miserable."

The Dilberito Age

The socially challenged, potato-shaped Dilbert has seen his star rise. He and his Machiavellian pet Dogbert started out in 1989 with a meager syndication deal. Now, the strip appears in more than 2,000 newspapers.

Oh, there are signs that Dilbert has past his prime. The TV show on UPN fizzled after two seasons. And the Dilbert book collections don't quite sell like they used to. But the strip is still strong, running in more than 2,000 newspapers.

And there is a core audience that's sure to keep Adams at the forefront of the comic world. Dilbert paraphernalia — the coffee mugs, calendars, etc. — are still a solid franchise, so much so that Adams parleyed his popularity into the microwave-able fast food market — introducing the Dilberito.

It's a different world than it was 10 years ago, when Adams was considered cutting edge for being the first cartoonist to print his e-mail address in his strip. And people just laugh at different things, he says.

"Remember when management books were all over the best-seller list and people used to quote from them like they were the word of God?" Adams asks. "You just can't make fun of those books anymore because folks aren't reading them like they used to."

Dot-com jokes came and went, and Adams just got more esoteric, introducing characters like Parrot Boy — a know-nothing colleague who just repeats everything he hears.

"People used to think I took Dilbert out of the workplace because I ran out of ideas for him there," Adams says. "Actually, I do as many workplace strips as I always did. It's just that people's perception of him changed."

Adams once struggled in a cube like the rest of us. He was an engineer at Pacific Bell, doodling what became the characters for his famous strip to blow off time at boring meetings. It's a job he kept for several years after United Media picked him up.

Dilbert now generates about $200 million in annual revenue, and Adams, 42, works from his home in Danville, Calif., where, he admits, he has "some toys."

"I'm a capitalist, I don't pretend that I'm not," he says.

But if you think he's one of those guys who keeps at his craft simply because he's an artist, think again. "This is work. I wouldn't do it if I didn't get paid. It's never a joy," he says.

"Still, I've always been conscious that, as far as work goes, you can't do much better."

So, ultimately, is Scott Adams just another American workaholic?

"God, no," he says. "I think that whole workaholic thing is a myth. I don't know if we work harder than Europeans or Asians. But, I know, when two people get together, they always talk to each other about how hard they work. So Americans might not be the hardest workers. But they could be the most outrageous liars."