Amazon.com Review:
You loved the comic strip; now read the business advice. Or should that be anti-business advice? Scott Adams provides the hapless victim of re-engineering, rightsizing and Total Quality Management some strategies for fighting back, er, coping. Forced to work long hours, with no hope of a raise? Adams offers tips on maintaining parity in compensation. Along the way, Adams explains what ISO 9000 really is and assesses the irresistibility of female engineers. The breath-taking cynicism of the strip should prepare readers for the author's no-holds-barred attack on management fads, large organizations, pointless bureaucracy and sadistic rule-makers who glory in control of office supplies. Readers of the on-line Dilbert Newsletter are familiar with the kind of e-mail Adams receives from his readers -- and may even have sent a few of those missives themselves. Along with illustrative strips, e-mail messages provide excruciating examples of corporate behavior which compel the reader to agree with Adams when he insists that "People are idiots". The final chapter offers a model for would-be successful businesses to follow: the OA5 model. It's introduced with little fanfare, no outrageous promises and just the right amount of self-deprecation.
I almost died laughing whilst reading this book:
Absolutely hysterically tearfully gaspingly chokingly hilarious. But also a very accurate depiction of how the business world can be - now THAT is scary!
The Real Thing:
What can I say? Scott Adams has been revealing the "Real-Life-In-The-Office" for a long time and with great success. I have been reading his daily comics (in Canada) religiously. This book covers --and uncovers--many harsh and unpleasant facts about the wild-and-crazy world of the office business wonderfully well.
How to survive in corporate industry:
When first Dilbert comics started to appear on newspapers I didn't understand them, they were probably only comics I didn't read. After I started to work in IT industry, Dilbert is the only comics I read. And the book is even better, it's pretty hard to understand these comics without explanation from Scott Adams. These comics feel so absurd, but even more absurd is how often you can find yourself in Dilbert-like situations in IT industry.
Dilbert Principle:
This book is wacky, zany, and humorous. Sometimes impossible, it portrays the picture of the workplace in the future. Workers are non-traditional and sometimes with out-of-this-world attitude. The elderly will have a hard time to accept the would be scenarios. The conversations are not typical of our grandparents' days. A warning to educators and authorities. They have to rethink their policies and programs if they want to avoid a future society like this.
Current financial crisis explained:
This is one of the books that I reread from time to time to remind myself of its insights, because they are important. In fact, recent events have made this book more topical than I'd like. You can probably skip the articles by the usual financial pundits about why the US banking system has tanked. Scott Adams' model explains the incompetence that permeates so many corporations in simple and plausible terms. His conclusions appear quite applicable to what is currently going on.
| Binding: | Audio Cassette | | Dewey Decimal Number: | 650.13 | | EAN: | 9780694516926 | | Format: | Abridged | | Format: | Audiobook | | ISBN: | 0694516929 | | Publication Date: | 1996-06-01 | | Release Date: | 1996-05-14 |
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