PERSONAL SPECIAL..................... THE DILBERT GUY

THE DILBERT GUY 

Scott Adams, the man who understands every cubicle-dwellers worst nightmares, on how to set yourself up for success

    Earlier this month, newspaper readers across the world were surprised when Dogbert, Dilbert’s anthropomorphic talking pet dog declared that Asok the intern was gay. This was to ‘commemorate’ the recent Supreme Court ruling criminalizing homosexuality in India. Explaining why the work place focused comic took a stand on this issue, its creator Scott Adams says, “It’s part of a larger pattern where the government has overstepped. I’ve been campaigning for allowing assisted-suicide and have rallied against President Obama’s closing of medial marijuana dispensaries. What all of these have in common is government overreach – into our privacy, bedrooms and health choices.” He points out that in a sense it’s not too far removed from Dilbert as this too, like the situations Dilbert finds himself in, are the result of a bureaucracy and control.
    On a larger level, Adams says that after his father passed away a few months ago, he feels free to take on more dangerous material as he is no longer worried about embarrassing his parents. “My career is at a point where I don’t need to make money if I choose not to. If I can make the world better at a personal cost to myself then I’m in a weird position where I can absorb the personal cost easily and the benefit to the world might be worth it,” he says.
    Dilbert, which captures the travails of a nerdy engineer in the corporate bureaucracy has had a successful run of 25 years now and is among the most widely syndicated comics, appearing in over 2000 publications in 75 countries and 25 languages. Scott Adams Inc, the business entity has also expanded to cover rights to the ten Dilbert books and Dilbert merchandise.
    At 56, Adams is at a stage in his career where it makes sense to look back and reflect. This eventually took shape as a book,
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life, a book he describes as something that takes an entire life to write. Explaining the series of incidents that shaped his life, he starts with the time he was still in college and had applied for a job at an accounting firm. He assumed that he must go dressed as the student he was and not dressed for the job he wanted, in a suit and tie, and was promptly thrown out. “Every moment of my life was like that. I realised that there’s no such thing as common sense, only experience. I was in a unique position to write about it partly because of my many, many personal failures which gave me a large enough canvas to draw upon, and also because I’m a professional simplifier. What I do best is take complicated things and boil them down to their simplest form,” he says.
    The first thing almost everyone does before embarking on something new is to talk to someone who has done it before about how they did it and how it worked out for them. Of course your situation will be different but this helps narrow down your options and eliminate any dumb choices along the way. Adams wasn’t quite so lucky. “I came from a small town and didn’t have any mentors. I didn’t know anyone who had been to college except for my teachers. The book is my attempt to add something to the universe that could be useful to someone else,” he says.
    Perhaps the most important bit of advice he gives is to set systems and not goals if you really want to succeed. “Goals are fine when your objective is simple and not very far — say trying to shoot a target at a shooting range. In the real world there is a lot of complexity and it’s impossible to predict economic forces, technological changes and even life changes,” says Adams. The risk then in focusing on a goal is that you may end up overlooking opportunities that may be better for you than the goal you’ve set yourself. A system moves you from low odds to better odds. If you’re working on a project and the final result isn’t what you want, it would be considered a failure. However, if you approach the project such that you will pick up skills and make contacts that will be useful to you in the future, you are bettering the odds of succeeding at a later stage. “Ultimately, luck will be the biggest factor in anyone’s success but you can do whatever is humanly possible to make yourself ready for it,” he says.
    Another way of improving the odds is to focus on layering complementary skills rather than excelling only at one thing. Adams started his career in the corporate world and even did a parttime MBA to move up the ranks. Now while it didn’t get him too far in the business world, it gave him enough fodder to fuel Dilbert. From being one in a thousand who knows how to do one thing very well, you could go to being one in twenty who can do three things, drastically improving your odds for success. Being an expert helps, but more often than not, having multiple skills might prove to be more useful.
    Adams also cautions against following your passion. “My problem with passion is that it’s not a quantifiable thing. The worst thing in the world is sitting around waiting for passion to happen. People do that,” he says. Instead, people need to work on themselves, on their health, energy and overall happiness. If you are healthy and your body is working, it will give you the energy to power through failures, work long hours and take on challenges. “Over time, I’ve observed that when I’m doing well at something, my excitement levels increase, and if I’m not doing well, then the passion decreases. I believe passion comes from success, but it doesn’t cause it. People tend to have it backwards,” says Adams.
    Maintaining a healthy diet and being fit form an important part of his book, perhaps because of the health issues he faced that could’ve potentially ended his career as a cartoonist and speaker. Equally important is the pursuit of happiness. “The only reasonable goal in life is maximizing your total lifetime experience of something called happiness,” he says in the book, also providing the mechanism to do this.
    Adams ran up an impressive list of ventures before and after finding success with Dilbert, ranging from videogames to restaurants to grocery delivery and patents for keypads. The trick to surviving these, he says, is not to get discouraged by these failures, rather learn from them. “I failed in my corporate career but that became the material that turned into Dilbert. Before Dilbert happened, I spent a great deal of time learning how to program. The videogames I created didn’t do well, but the skills allowed me to get promoted at my day job and ultimately the same skill was the biggest key to turning Dilbert into a successful comic — specifically when I started running my email address with the strip. This was in ’93 when email wasn’t a very well known tool,” he says.
    There was a basic business principle he had learnt while doing his MBA — connect with the customer — something cartoonists didn’t do. Adams’ meagre business and technology skills allowed him to get in touch with readers who wrote in to say that they enjoyed it when Dilbert was doing stuff at work, not so much at home. “That’s when I changed it to a workplace focused strip and that’s when Dilbert really took off. If it wasn’t for failed careers and projects, I wouldn’t have been able to grow it in this manner,” he says.
    Going ahead, Adams is clear that whatever else he does on the work front would be geared towards making the world a better place. He’s set up a new business, calendartree.com, that allows people to share schedules in an easier manner. He agrees it won’t cure cancer, but it will make people’s lives easier. Besides, if it does well, he could sell it for a billion dollars and donate the money for curing cancer.
    In keeping with his principle of learning something from others, Adams is trying to follow Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff’s approach to charity at calendartree.com. One percent of the profits, equity and employees time at Salesforce.com goes to charity and Adams admits that Benioff was a huge influence on him in wanting to do something similar.
    Towards the end of his father’s longdrawn illness, Adams got extremely involved with the assisted suicide campaign. He points out that one big change that needs to happen is that the question needs to be rephrased. Instead of asking ‘Do you think doctors should be able to kill patients in certain circumstances?’ the question needs to be ‘Do you think the government should have a veto over a healthcare decision you, your family and doctor made?’ “From now to the end of time, anyone who googles the topic will see my name and argument come up. Everyone who is important in this debate will see it. So my rephrasing the question did make a difference,” says Adams.
    Ultimately, Adams would want people to see the ideas in the book as additional tools in their toolbox and not a rigid to-do list. “One single prescription can’t fit every disease but this template can be a good starting point before evaluating another approach,” says Adams. People might end up doing things differently, but it’s better than ‘floating in the middle of the universe’ the way Adams was at age 19.

b y Priyanka Sangani CDET140228