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Dilbert Principle
Nov. 18th, 2011 12:31 pmI USE A LOT OF "BAD BOSS" THEMES in my syndicated cartoon strip, "Dilbert." I'll never run out of material. I get a hundred e-mail messages a day, mostly from people who are complaining about their own clueless managers. Here are some of my favorite stories, all allegedly true:
A vice president insists that the company's new battery-powered product be equipped with a light that comes on to tell you when the power is off.
An employee suggests setting priorities so they'll know how to apply their limited resources. The manager's response: "Why can't we concentrate our resources across the board?"
A manager wants to find and fix software bugs more quickly. He offers an incentive plan: $20 for each bug the Quality Assurance people find and $20 for each bug the programmers fix. (These are the same programmers who create the bugs.) Result: An underground economy in "bugs" springs up instantly. The plan is rethought after one employee nets $1,700 the first week. Stories like these prompted me to do the first annual Dilbert Survey to find out what management practices were most annoying to employees. The choices included the usual suspects: Quality, Empowerment, Re-engineering and the like. But the number-one vote-getter on this highly unscientific survey was "Idiots Promoted to Management." This seemed like a subtle change from the old concept where capable workers were promoted until they reached their level of incompetence -- the Peter Principle. Now, apparently, the incompetent workers are promoted directly to management without ever passing through the temporary competence stage.
( Read more... )
A vice president insists that the company's new battery-powered product be equipped with a light that comes on to tell you when the power is off.
An employee suggests setting priorities so they'll know how to apply their limited resources. The manager's response: "Why can't we concentrate our resources across the board?"
A manager wants to find and fix software bugs more quickly. He offers an incentive plan: $20 for each bug the Quality Assurance people find and $20 for each bug the programmers fix. (These are the same programmers who create the bugs.) Result: An underground economy in "bugs" springs up instantly. The plan is rethought after one employee nets $1,700 the first week. Stories like these prompted me to do the first annual Dilbert Survey to find out what management practices were most annoying to employees. The choices included the usual suspects: Quality, Empowerment, Re-engineering and the like. But the number-one vote-getter on this highly unscientific survey was "Idiots Promoted to Management." This seemed like a subtle change from the old concept where capable workers were promoted until they reached their level of incompetence -- the Peter Principle. Now, apparently, the incompetent workers are promoted directly to management without ever passing through the temporary competence stage.
( Read more... )
