Scott Adams warned us about bad bosses—then we laughed it off

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Boardrooms would have been better places had their inmates paid more heed to Scott Adams, who passed away on Tuesday at the age of 68. Dilbert—the necktie-wearing, cubicle-bound corporate victim, and Adams’s doppelgänger—was all the rage among executives through the 1990s.

Sadly, it was for all the wrong reasons. The comic strip, which appeared in thousands of newspapers around the world, was good for a laugh and a reliable icebreaker at the company do. But its real message—of systemic, institutional incompetence—was lost amid the mirth and chuckles.

Much like Shakespeare’s fools, who spoke truth to power under the guise of nonsense, Dilbert offered profound insights that went unheeded by a corporate class that preferred to treat the comic as a mascot rather than a mirror. The 1980s and 1990s marked the high tide of corporate jargon and middle-management bloat. Driven by dapper young men and women fresh out of business schools—where they learned more about management than about business—companies gleefully transformed themselves into bureaucratic labyrinths.

For Adams, fresh from a nine-year stint at Pacific Bell (and a previous role at Crocker National Bank), this was fertile ground for caricature. Employing a style of minimalist, almost primitive line work, Adams took aim at the foibles and pretensions passing for corporate life. Unlike the detailed, frantic energy of Mort Walker’s Beetle Bailey or the soft-edged whimsy of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, Adams used a flat, deadpan aesthetic that mirrored the sterile environment of the office.

His humour was unsparing and cynically observant. Each week, he lashed out at another of the lunacies that peppered the workday. The Dilbert