Scott Raymond Adams is perhaps America’s most unlikely management commentator. A self-confessed “complete failure” in corporate America, he has taken his humunculus, Dilbert, from the margins of his workplace notepad to the pages of more than 800 newspapers.
This is not to imply that he’s not qualified to pontificate on the idiosyncrasies of the business world. As one who spent his entire working life in it, Adams stubbornly retained a rebellious outsider’s perspective that enables him to perceive the flaws and foibles in a corporate structure and to present them in such a stark manner as to be funny and, on occasion, even jolting.
In Dilbert, Adams is tilling new ground in two of comics’ most-plowed fields: the workplace strip and the hapless-soul strip. While strips centered around the workplace have especially been a staple of the comics page since America began its migration from factories to office buildings after World War II, Dilbert clearly has its finger on the pulse: in holding a mirror up to the face of corporate management, Adams, 38, has given voice to a huge cross-section of America’s workforce. He has, in effect, created a vessel into which his readers pour their mutual feelings of frustration, helplessness, bleak humor and amusement.
Adams has been shrewd in exposing Dilbert to new readers: not only is the strip one of the fastest-growing on the comics pages, but it has also galloped out front in cyberspace: Dilbert’s presence on the Internet’s World Wide Web, United Media’s Web site and America OnLine generates heavy traffic and serves as a gathering place for his fans. In harnessing the nascent power of computer networks, Adams has made his creation accessible to readers who might otherwise fail to see it, creating demand where none had existed and generating more than 100 e-mail messages daily. His newsletter, which contains behind-the-scenes anecdotes and humorous minutae, goes out to more than 30,000 subscribers. It can truthfully be said that Adams, a Windham, New York, native who resides in northern California, owes his career in cartooning in part to good timing: his rise to cartooning stardom is a study in both happy coincidence and the inexorable grip the medium exerts on certain individuals. Having hung up his T-square on more than one occasion, Adams was repeatedly drawn back to cartooning. Success in the field that seemed to choose him as much as he chose it has been much less elusive than it had been in the corporate environment, although it had ironically been the irritation of the corporate world that caused the pearl that is Dilbert to form.
So strong is Dilbert’s appeal that the strip has been embraced by merchandisers, who are producing mugs, T-shirts, calendars and of course a half-dozen book collections, including the most recent, It’s Obvious You Won’t Survive By Your Wits Alone. (Dilbert and Dogbert dolls are in the works, which may become the suction-cup Garfields of the cubicle set.) Adams has also parlayed his workplace-wise humor into a lucrative second career: speaking to business groups, promising to teach them absolutely nothing and delivering fully.
The irony of any of this is not lost on Adams, who is in the enviable position of having the raw materials for his strip given to him by grateful fans who sense a kindred soul. While not a “business guru” in the term’s traditionally narrow sense, Adams certainly serves as a therapist of sorts for his readers who feel that he—and he alone—possesses a special insight into their workplace life.
This interview was conducted, transcribed and edited by Tom Heintjes.
Tom Heintjes: Shortly before this interview, you were asked to leave your job at Pacific Bell. Do you think your rebellious Dilbert cartoons had anything to do with it?
Scott Adams: They said it was because of budgetary reasons, but . . . you draw your own conclusions.
Heintjes: Are you surprised that leaving your job resulted in news stories in newspapers across the country?
Adams: I kind of expected it, frankly. It's the kind of ironic news that newspapers love to report.
Heintjes: Are you losing a plentiful source of Dilbert material?
Adams: No, for probably the last two years I hadn't used any fodder from the day job. It was almost all suggestions from electronic mail and from my own 15 years of experience up to that point.
Heintjes: I imagine that your supervisors at PacBell dreaded inviting you to meetings for fear that they would find themselves in your sights.
Adams: [laughter] There was always a little bit of concern about that.
Heintjes: Did you get the feeling during your years in the corporate world that your managers were always thinking, “I know you're sitting there dreaming up malicious stuff about managers—just wait until your next salary review”? Or were they able not to personalize your strip work?
Adams: I think every manager I've ever had definitely thought about that every time they talked to me. It worked both ways, too. Sometimes my coworkers would be hesitant to do silly things in front of me, but other times they would be delighted for me to make fun of them, because it would be their 15 minutes of fame. But you've got to think that all the stupid and absurd things I make fun of, if the people who were doing them knew they were stupid and absurd, they wouldn’t do them. People don’t realize they have the ability toregulate their behavior in a meaningful way.
Heintjes: How does it feel to have gone from a comic-strip artist to being perceived as something of a management guru? Does that ever strike you as odd?
Adams: That strikes me as odd every day. On Tuesday, there will be a Wall Street Journal article. They asked me my thoughts on careers. Now here I am, a person who has never succeeded in a corporate job in any meaningful way—
Heintjes: Do you perceive that as true?
Adams: Oh God, yes. I was a total failure in corporate America in terms of my own career.
Heintjes: But you worked in it for years.
Adams: But I never got to a serious management-level position. I never supervised an employee in the nine years I was at Pacific Bell. I think that would be a kind of marker of whether you were advancing or not. Obviously, a lot of that had to do with the fact that just at the point when I was most promotable by age and experience, I was also most associated with Dilbert, so it was pretty clear to everyone that that was not my path. I always assumed that had that not been there, I would have found some way to succeed, but given that I didn’t, it’s kind of interesting that people look to me for insights.
I guess the one thing I can do that other people can’t do is play a court jester role. I can say anything about anybody—or so it seems—and I don’t get in trouble. There’s an ability to speak clearly. And another skill I have that people seem to appreciate in that business guru role is that I’m good at simplifying things down to their basic element, and that alone has some value. But the thing that I don’t have is a better idea.
Heintjes: I was going to ask you about that. It’s easy to lampoon and take shots—especially at such an obvious target—but it’s harder to devise solutions and propose alternatives. Does that ever occur to you?
Adams: It occurs to me constantly. There are some things that I think I have some solutions to.
Heintjes: Such as what?
Adams: One good example is about dress codes. One thing that a lot of companies are doing is having a casual day, and then defining what casual means to them. And what they usually do is define a type of clothing that few people own in any quantity, so they defeat the objective of looking good or feeling good, in the name of looking good and feeling good.
Heintjes: So the result is that people have to go out and spend money on clothes they wouldn’t otherwise even want.
Adams: Right. The whole purpose is defeated. Contrast that with United Media. The new president of United Media, Doug Stern. He had that same decision to make—they were thinking about going casual on Friday. He said, “How does it make sense that if it’s OK on Friday, it’s not OK on the other days?” That’s the first absurdity—that it would be OK only one day of the week. So he did the sensible thing and said, “If we’re going to do it, let’s just do it.” So it’s casual all the time. Now, I don’t know if he’s specified what is sensible or not sensible, or if he left it to people’s better judgment, which is a more reasonable approach.
Now here’s a case where I absolutely have a better idea—there’s no doubt about it. You have to pick one—either you’re casual or you’re not. But being casual one day a week, or being casual and then specifying what “casual“ is, seems nonsensical. And that’s just a case of clarity of thought. I don’t think that takes any experience in the business world. You could pick a Tibetan monk out of the monastery and say, “Here are the facts—which one makes sense to you?” I’m pretty sure he would come down on my side on this one.
Heintjes: Do you feel that had your career advanced more traditionally, you might have become co-opted by corporate America and you would have then suffered creatively? You might have been less able to perceive the foibles of management.
Adams: Well, certainly my bitterness has worked in my favor. Being the one who was having it done to him instead of being the one doing it to others had some benefit in the creative process.
Heintjes: You know, now that you’re a “management guru,” you can go around and do what all the other management gurus do—charge exorbitant sums to talk to executives.
Adams: I’m already doing that.
Heintjes: You are?
Adams: That’s why I’ve been traveling so much. Of course, I don’t teach them how to manage; I just entertain them. The reason I get asked is because they like the strip, and they know the employees will pay attention. So I have a fairly booming speaking business now.
Heintjes: Who is your primary audience?
Adams: Big companies, technology companies in particular, and trade shows.
Heintjes: Do you speak to executives or rank-and-file employees?
Adams: Usually some combination of both. Not so much executives alone—I try to shy away from those types of groups, but usually middle managers and the technology people in particular.
Heintjes: If you had an audience composed exclusively of executives, you might have to erect one of those chicken-wire fences. “Now we’ve got him.”
Adams: I’m actually making more money speaking than I am cartooning at this point.
Heintjes: Is that right? I’ll bet you never saw it coming, did you?
Adams: No, not that. I didn’t see that coming at all. That was a complete surprise.
Heintjes: How did it happen? Obviously, it’s not something you deliberately tried to build up.
Adams: I got a phone call from a woman in Canada who said they had this association of people in the oil industry, and that they were big fans of Dilbert, and they wondered if I would come up and give a talk. I had never done such a thing in that context. I’d done a lot of speaking, but it was always for Pacific Bell business. So I said, “Well, I’m not crazy about coming to Canada,” and she said they would pay me. So I said, “Let me get back to you with a price.” So I asked someone at United Media what I should charge, and he said, “Tell them you’ll do it for $5,000 plus travel,” which sounded like an amazingly godawful number that would make her go away. So I called her and said, “Sure I’ll come up and talk to your group for an hour for $5,000 plus travel.” She said, “OK, when can you be here?” For that, I put together a bunch of material. Then my phone would ring occasionally—maybe once a month—and someone would ask me to speak, and since I already had the material put together, I would say, “Sure—for $5,000.”
Heintjes: And this all started from word of mouth from that one event in Canada?
Adams: Some word of mouth, but even more from people just having the same idea independently. Since then, I’ve raised my price because demand was growing. Now I charge $7,500 to talk to people for an hour. I get probably two or three speaking requests a day, of which I can only do a few a month. I get to pick the ones I want. I probably turn down 10 for every one I do.
Heintjes: Most people fear public speaking above all else. In your early talks, did you have any butterflies before taking the stage?
Adams: I took the Dale Carnegie course a few years ago—it’s one of the most valuable things I’ve ever done. When I look at all the things I’ve done, probably the Dale Carnegie course and my hypnosis course are the most important ones.
Heintjes: Hypnosis?
Adams: I’m a licensed hypnotist.
Heintjes: What do you do with that?
Adams: I haven’t done anything with it lately, but at one point I was thinking about it as a career. I used it for past-life regression and getting people’s arms to float.
Heintjes: Why would you want to get people’s arms to float?
Adams: It validates that they’re in a deep sleep.
Heintjes: Did hypnosis tell you anything interesting about people?
Adams: Oh, lots. You learn how fragile the human mind is, and how overrated it is, in a sense. It’s overwhelmingly influenced by outside sounds and sensations, almost to the exclusion of the logical stuff that’s going on. Your whole impression of why people act the way they do is changed.
Heintjes: What’s the benefit of the Dale Carnegie public-speaking course?
Adams: It makes you so confident in front of an audience that it’s an adrenaline rush. The most enjoyable part is the public speaking. The parts I don’t like are the traveling and the preparation.
Heintjes: What is at the core of one of your talks? Is it just to lampoon management, or is there actual advice?
Adams: I guarantee people that they will learn nothing useful in my talks. That’s actually part of my contract. What I talk about is purely for entertainment. Most people use it to break up a technical conference or as an incentive for people to stay through to get to some other event, or just as a reward because they’ve done a good job. The three things I talk about are how I became a cartoonist, I show them some of the cartoons that have never been published and the ones that would have gotten me in trouble if they had been published, and then I teach them my secrets for writing humor. I show them my formula for taking a situation and adding the humorous element.
Heintjes: Would you be willing to share with us the cartoons you use during your talks?
Adams: No. Publishing them would diminish my income seriously.
Heintjes: I’ll just have to attend one of your talks, I guess. It sounds as if everyone comes away learning nothing but happy as hell.
Adams: That’s the point!
Heintjes: Are your talks fairly low-tech affairs?
Adams: It’s me with overhead transparencies. I’ve put it on computer and I’ve put it on slides, and it turns out that the perfect technical solution is overhead transparencies. It just works better.
Heintjes: The high-tech solution isn’t always the best one, I
suppose. In addition to the strip, you’re also working on a prose book about management, aren’t you?
Adams: I’m well on my way to completing that. We have a publisher and we have deadlines. It’ll probably contain some earlier cartoons that illustrate the points I’m writing about.
Heintjes: Is there a working title?
Adams: It’ll probably be called The Dilbert Principle. The single biggest point I make in the book is that people are idiots. And I’m careful to say that I’m not excluding myself from this category. We’re all idiots, but about different things at different times. If you put three of us in a room, chances are you’ve got yourself an idiot. [laughter] And it’s not related to IQ or education or anything else—there’s just something about humans that makes us behave in really preposterous, absurdways. There’s something about the business environment that’s supposed to be analytical and based on data, but when you put the two together, it’s really what makes Dilbert work—it’s the most absurd two things you can find in one space.
Heintjes: When you were at Pacific Bell, did you inhabit a cubicle?
Adams: I was a cubicle person the entire nine years I was there.
Heintjes: You’ve spoken earlier about companies’ policies concerning what is and isn’t permissible in personalizing a cubicle. Were you able to personalize yours?
Adams: There were rules concerning putting things above the line of the wall. We couldn’t do that. And I think there were guidelines about what you could put outside the cubicles. And you couldn’t have plants.
Heintjes: So much for trying to purify the recycled air.
Adams: I think they were worried about bugs or something. I never found out. You couldn’t have a coffee maker or an electric device like that. It was considered a fire hazard. You couldn’t have a phone number on your cubicle wall. If you had a phone list, you couldn’t put it on the wall because that was considered confidential information, even though we’re the phone company, and all you have to do is ask for that information and we give it to you. And they had a clean-desk policy, meaning that anything that was an important document had to be put away at night, and the best way to ensure that nothing important was left out was to put everything away at night.
Heintjes: And these were formal, codified rules?
Adams: Yeah, they were formal rules.
Heintjes: Did you have any cartoons up in your cubicle—your own or those of others?
Adams: Yeah, I had some up. I had a real messy cubicle, actually. I was never really into the cleanliness thing. I think it was because I had such low regard for the department. I’m real neat at home—everything’s in its place. But at the office, I didn’t mind coming in and throwing something on the ground.
Heintjes: “There’s that rebel Adams again, flouting the rules.”
Adams: I don’t think it was that so much as the fact that I just didn’t care.
Heintjes: Did your co-workers have Dilbert strips up in their cubicles?
Adams: Oh, sure—hundreds of them.
Heintjes: How did it feel to see that?
Adams: Pretty cool. It was strange at first, but you get used to
it. I actually used it as market research. I’d walk around the building—and we had around 8,000 employees—and see which ones were working.
Heintjes: From your point of view, what is the role of a manager?
Adams: Well, in the simplest sense, it’s to make sure things work better than they would if there wasn’t a manager. But that’s got to be different in every situation. In many situations, that means that employees have the resources and training necessary for them to do what they’re supposed to be doing, and that you’re removing obstacles for them. So often you end up as a buffer between the employees and the onerous rules of the corporation, protecting the company from itself. In the worst case, you’re micromanaging them or making them unhappy all the time as part of the job.
Heintjes: It seems that many managers are faced with diverse missions: on the one hand, they’re supposed to be leading everyone toward a common goal, yet they’re not supposed to stifle everyone’s individuality. That’s a tough balance to strike.
Adams: I think most managers have largely given up on that whole “get them to think independently” concept.
Heintjes: You think they’d just prefer the workers to come in lobotomized and get the job done?
Adams: Yeah, frankly, because if you let everybody be creative you couldn’t run a company. It’s not like there’s an alternative. I wouldn’t fault companies for not allowing people to be creative, because that’s just simply not an option. If you let everyone run around being creative, you find that they do what I did: start a business on the side. There’s a huge underground economy at most companies: people selling Amway out of their cubicles, stuff like that. It’s hard to walk down the hallway of Pacific Bell and find somebody who doesn’t have a second job. It’s usually the kind of job you can run out of your cubicle.
Heintjes: Do you think most managers feel threatened by their employees’ moonlighting? “Isn’t working for me good enough for you?”
Adams: Some are threatened, but most of them are doing it themselves too. It’s not like it’s only rank-and-file who are doing it.
Heintjes: Everyone stays busy, just not with PacBell work.
Adams: Yeah. It only gets bad when they start answering the phone with “Hello—Bob’s Auto Repair.” [laughter]
Heintjes: Let’s talk a bit about your early interest in comics—did you read them as a child?
Adams: I was a voracious comic-book reader, especially Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and Superman.
Heintjes: A guy who read both Marvel and DC, eh?
Adams: Yeah, I went both ways. [laughter] And Mad magazine was the major publication of the age.
Heintjes: When would this have been?
Adams: I was born in ’57, and I don’t remember ever not reading comic books. And Peanuts books were how I learned to read, literally. They were the first reason I found to want to learn how to read. Those were the big influences. I can’t say I’ve ever considered myself a comics historian. It was just something I liked.
Heintjes: I’ve noticed in your Dilbert newsletters that you feel fairly comfortable taking some good-natured shots at The Family Circus. Are you actually fond of the strip?
Adams: [laughter] Well, first of all, you have to say that for someone to write a strip that’s been that popular for that long, he’s obviously doing something very right. I wish I could do something that would be that well-loved. But for me, it’s more of a matter of product differentiation. It’s a rallying cry, and it’s just fun. I’ve met Bil Keane, and he’s a real nice guy.
Heintjes: And his own sense of humor is very different from the strip’s.
Adams: Oh, very. And everyone knows it’s all in fun.
Heintjes: Let’s move on to one of your other influences: when did you get your first computer?
Adams: I started work right out of school at Crocker Bank in San Francisco. I found myself in a management training program. One day, the senior vice president called me in and said that he needed a computer system to track progress in the various branches, and could I do that? Now, up to that point, my only experience with computers had been that it was the only class I ever dropped in college. It was a programming class. But there was a huge raise associated with accepting this assignment, so of course I said, “Well, how hard could it be?” So suddenly, I became the computer expert, literally without having ever used one. But this was in 1980, when no one was acomputer expert, really.
Heintjes: But you must have had some sort of innate aptitude that allowed you to wing it.
Adams: Well, there’s a reason it was the only class I ever dropped in college, and that is because I had a D in it. But those were the days when you had to write the programs right the first time. But once computers became more like modeling clay, where you could try it and test it, try it and test it, and gradually shape it until you got it where you wanted it, it became very much wedded with my talents. There’s a very creative aspect to computers, particularly with the programming. Programming is like leaving your body, because you have to imagine yourself inside the commands. It’s like you’re building this big playground, and you’re deciding where the swings go and where the basketball court is and the people running around after the bouncing basketball. You have to imagine it all as almost physical objects, with yourself in the middle of it, in order to write these little command lines that create programs. So the imagination part of programming was just tremendously exciting for me—the fact that you could write a few lines of code and have the program do a different thing. That’s what really got me turned on, and after I got my own computer I used to write a lot of programs late at night, just for fun.
Heintjes: What was your first computer?
Adams: It was an IBM clone, put out by some company that existed for about six months. It was a dual-floppy system with 640K of RAM.
Heintjes: As a boy, did you show a creative impulse?
Adams: I was pretty much a constant doodler. I mentioned modeling clay because I messed around with that a lot. My mother was a big doodler, so I got it from her.
Heintjes: Your family probably thought you had a boy’s normal interest in comic books. Little did they know what you’d grow up to be.
Adams: Well, I did sign up for the Famous Artists course. A couple of years ago, my mother found my old application for the course and sent it to me. I’d forgotten all about it, frankly. At least at 11 years old I was thinking about being a cartoonist. And I remember looking at Charles Schulz’s Peanuts books and thinking that I wanted to grow up to be a rich cartoonist, too. Unfortunately, I was a little too smart about the ways of the world, and when I looked into it, I realized that there was only one Charles Schulz. [laughter] I’m not sure how many people there were on earth at that time—maybe 2 billion or 3 billion—and yet, there was only one Charles Schulz.
Heintjes: The odds are against duplicating that success.
Adams: Yeah. You could find other examples, like Al Capp, but you run out of examples real fast.
Heintjes: It’s a short list indeed.
Adams: So from a purely practical perspective, after the Famous Artists school rejected me—I was only 11, and you have to be at least 12—I pretty much gave up on it and didn’t think about it until much later in life.
Heintjes: You gave up on it because of the odds against commercial success?
Adams: Well, I never stopped doodling for myself. But as a career goal, it seemed even at that young age so wildly impractical. As a teenager, I don’t recall ever thinking seriously that could ever be a job.
Heintjes: What an intriguing mix of creativity and pragmatism.
Adams: I actually score identical scores on my math and verbal. I have a classic Gemini personality.
Heintjes: What reignited your interest in cartooning as a profession, after having ceased to consider it for many years?
Adams: I had finished my MBA, and I didn’t have to go to school at night anymore. It seemed like I had so much free time! [laughter] It seemed like I need to be doing something, and I wanted to try one more time to be a cartoonist. But again, I was practical about it, and I really wanted to see if I could get just one cartoon published, in a magazine or something. On the high end, I thought I could make $100 now and then, and that would be a nice supplement to my income without having to work very hard. And mostly for ego, frankly. But I didn’t know how to do it. But as these things work, when you start setting a goal, sometimes your filters change, and you start noticing things you wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. Some things that seem like coincidences start happening.
Heintjes: Such as what, in your case?
Adams: In particular, coming home one night and catching the end of a TV show on how to be a cartoonist. Now, to the best of my knowledge, I hadn’t seen one before, and I haven’t seen one since. But at this very exact point in my life when I decided I need to learn how to be a cartoonist, there it was! I missed almost the entire show, and I caught only enough of it to know what it was about, and I just wrote down the information about the host. I got enough from the closing credits that I could track him down. I wrote a letter to the host, Jack Cassady, and asked him a few questions like “what materials do you use” and “how do you submit things” and “who do you send them to.” He was nice enough to write back a fairly lengthy letter answering all my questions and was nice enough to point me in the direction of books I needed, like the Artist’s Market. He told me to make sure I didn’t get discouraged if I got a lot of rejections, because that would be common in this business when you’re starting out. So I got all excited from his advice and put together about a half-dozen cartoons and sent them off to Playboy and The New Yorker.
Heintjes: Did the single-panel gag cartoon hold a special appeal to you, or did you feel that type of cartoon was something you could handle better?
Adams: It seemed more accessible. I don’t remember ever ruling out multipanel strips except for the obvious fact that they seemed more like work. Beyond that, I don’t think I ever thought about it too much. So I sent them off, and they came back with form-letter rejections fairly quickly, and I decided to give it up. It seemed I didn’t have enough talent even to get a personal reply. It just didn’t seem like it was going anywhere. So I put away materials and didn’t think about cartooning for about a year.
Heintjes: During that time, did you still read the comics?
Adams: Yeah, I read them in the daily papers as I always had.
Heintjes: So you weren’t so devastated that you couldn’t even bring yourself to look at other comics.
Adams: No, I didn’t feel crushed. Acceptance just didn’t seem likely enough at the time. Then one day I got a follow-up letter from Jack Cassady. I had not even thanked him for the original letter he’d sent me. So it was kind of surprising that he’d write to a stranger a second time. He wrote just to say that he was going through some files and he’d found a letter from me and some samples I’d sent to him. The only reason he wrote was to make sure I hadn’t given up and to encourage me to keep submitting stuff.
Heintjes: He gave you a kick in the seat of your pants.
Adams: A major one. The key thing here is that he had nothing to gain, not even thanking him for the help. He had no reason to believe that I would even thank him for the advice, since I hadn’t responded to his first advice. He didn’t even have the hope of seeing the look on my face. [laughter] This was as close as you can get to a purely selfless act, of being a part of the human experience, and it touched me deeply. I got very excited, and feeling rather heady from all this, and having never been published, I decided I would raise my sights to major cartoon syndication. At that point, Dilbert had sort of grown up in doodles at work.
Heintjes: So you already had a vehicle.
Adams: Well, I knew the bare bones of it. I knew he was a technical guy. I’d invented Dogbert at that point, and they were the only characters. I had drawn them enough that they looked the same from drawing to drawing, which is a big deal. So I put together about 50 sample strips. I drew one a day, just like I was a cartoonist. My intent was that I would throw away the ones that were bad and just submit that good ones. So I got my 50 strips together—
Heintjes: Let me guess—you loved them all.
Adams: No, I loved some and hated others. But when my friends were visiting, I would have them sort them into piles of which ones they thought were good and which ones they thought were bad, so I would know which ones to submit. Now, this was a huge learning experience for me. There was absolutely no correlation between one person’s pile and another. Somebody would say, “These are pretty good, but this one just stinks. Whatever you do, don’t submit this one.” Just as often, that would be the one that somebody else would pick out of a pile and say, “Man, this one’s a keeper—this is your best work.”
Heintjes: So much for Plan A. What did you do to weed them out?
Adams: I sent all 50. That was the learning. You don’t know who’s on the other end, and if you try to guess, you’re doing yourself a disservice.
Heintjes: You sent them out to all the syndicates?
Adams: All the big ones. The usual suspects. I got a call from the editor of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, which was a big deal. Unfortunately, he called to suggest that I take art classes or perhaps work with an artist. He suggested some artists and sent me some samples of their work. But I really was kind of more interested in the drawing than the writing at the time. In recent years, that’s reversed, but at the time, I thought, “You know, you’re not really a cartoonist unless you’re drawing the damned thing.” It seemed to be missing the point. And yet, hearing from a syndicate was very exciting for me. I probably would not have said “no” if I had liked the samples he had sent me, but I didn’t. They were professional-looking, but completely lacking soul.
Another week or so went by, and I got a call froma woman from United Media who said she was an editor, and she said she wanted to offer me a contract to be a syndicated cartoonist. Right over the phone. But I had never heard of United Media. I had sent my samples to United Feature Syndicate. Not knowing that United Media is the parent company of United Feature, I was very suspicious of this phone call, for two reasons. One, I had no way of knowing how they had gotten my samples, so I didn’t know if they were reputable. Second, they were offering me a contract to be a syndicated cartoonist over the phone, so clearly, their credibility was very low with me. These were two highly suspicious things coming together. For God’s sake, they looked at the same samples the guy at the L.A. Times Syndicate looked at. So I said, “Well, the drawing’s kind of crude, don’t you think?” And she said, “No, it’s fine.”
So she had no credibility whatsoever at this point. I said I needed some references, so I asked if she had ever worked with any cartoonists I might have heard of, at which point she informed me that she handled Peanuts and Garfield and went down the list. I suddenly realized that my negotiating position had been somewhat weakened. But I did go ahead and get a reference.
Heintjes: Who would that have been?
Adams: Pat Brady. I called him and asked him about working with these folks. He gave them a glowing endorsement, and I started negotiating with United. I got my lawyer involved.
Heintjes: Had you had a lawyer already?
Adams: Not until that point. I went through the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco and got a recommendation of someone who was familiar with the industry.
Heintjes: What was the negotiating phase like?
Adams: I knew enough about business that I needed to take myself out of the process, so I wanted a hired gun. Someone who would not say, “Oh my God, if I say this, they’ll yank the contract and my entire life will be over.” I wanted it to be dispassionate. I got lucky—my lawyer wasan expert with contracts, and I outlined with him what I thought were the minimums and what were the maximums. The syndicates have their own contracts that they would obviously like you to sign, but I don’t know if they realistically expect anyone to sign it the way it’s written.
Heintjes: I suspect they start from their ideal and realize they have to work down from that.
Adams: I wonder if anybody ever signs it without negotiating. It seems like somebody must. You get the feeling that they have all the negotiating position and you have none, because you think, clearly, you want them far more than they want you. Their lives won’t be different if you’re gone tomorrow. But that’s not entirely true. You actually do have . . . I wouldn’t call it clout, but you do have some positioning right off the bat, because of the several thousand submissions that they see, they don’t offer many people a contract. You have to keep that in mind—there’s a reason they called you.
Heintjes: They think you can make them money, and that’s clearly of importance to them.
Adams: Right. So I took the position that absolutely a deal would be made. Essentially, I agreed to agree. All this stuff like copyright ownership, percentages, minimums, things like that, the lawyer hammered out over the course of a few months. That was a real nail-biting time, because the longer it goes, the more something could go wrong. Somebody could be hit by a meteor or change their mind.
Heintjes: What ultimately was arranged regarding ownership of the Dilbert property?
Adams: United Media owns the copyright. To be honest, I have never figured out the advantage of owning the copyright. I’ve figured out lots of disadvantages, but I haven’t found an advantage. I think the presumed advantage is that you have more control over your destiny. You can say “no” to more things, but the reality is that, as the artist, you still have that control. If United Media were ever to say, “We know you won’t like this, but we’re going to license your work to the Ku Klux Klan,” they would be out of business. So all these things you presume a company is going to do abuse this trust are wholly unrealistic. If you think about it, what do they own? They own the hope that you won’t be hit by a car, that you’ll continue to be funny, and that they can continue to share in this revenue stream after they’ve put hundreds of thousands of dollars into your development. They own very little, and they’re not going to mess it up by doing something that’s entirely avoidable.
Heintjes: Did you have a development phase with United?
Adams: Yeah, we did the usual six-month period. I guess that’s usual.
Heintjes: What was its benefit?
Adams: If you have a good editor, it’s a way to figure out what works and what doesn’t. At no point did Sarah [Gillespie, United Feature’s comics editor] say, “How about changing this word?” or anything like that. She never said, “Change this creative element.” She did offer—and this was very helpful—to tell me which ones she thought were funny and which ones she didn’t think were funny. Sometimes a little bit about why, but most of the time it was me figuring out on my own what worked, with a professional feedback mechanism. She had the breadth of experience to know not only what she liked but what others would like.
Heintjes: In the early Dilbert strips, he was more of an inventor, and over the years the emphasis has shifted to his office life. Was this a conscious shift on your part?
Adams: That change was a direct result of e-mail. People wanted to see him in the office more. At first, it was probably 80 percent inventor, 20 percent office. That’s flip-flopped now.
Heintjes: You mentioned that Sarah Gillespie had no problems with your art. I’m interested to know how you’d rate yourself purely as a draftsman.
Adams: On a scale of one to 10, 10 being Pat Brady, and I won’t name a one. But even the one is currently in newspapers. On that scale, I’d say I’m a 4.8.
Heintjes: Do you enjoy drawing?
Adams: There is a certain delight in the creative process. Now that it’s a job and I do a lot of it, I can’t say that I get delight out of it each and every time I draw, but once in a while you really nail something, and you sit back and say, “Man, that was fun!”
Heintjes: You mentioned that Dilbert sprang to life over time on your office notepads.
Adams: He’s what I drew when I was bored to death in meetings. I would look around at my co-workers. They were all a bit of Dilbert.
Heintjes: His persona was derived from them?
Adams: He’s a little bit of me, a little bit of my coworkers.
Heintjes: What part of him is you?
Adams: His love of technology for the sake of technology. His being a powerless victim in a cubicle was all me, and I think his experience with Dogbert is a little bit of me too, because I grew up with a floppy-eared beagle who, for the 14 years of her life, never once came when called.
Heintjes: That’s not very doglike.
Adams: No—have you ever heard of a family dog that wouldn’t come when you called its name?
Heintjes: That’s not very beagle-like either, because they’re so obedient and eager to please.
Adams: I think it scarred me for life. [laughter]
Heintjes: How much of you speaks through Dogbert?
Adams: He says all the things I wish I could say if I could get away with it. If you were a small dog, no one would kick you, because that would be cruel. What if you could say anything you wanted to? He’s kind of the tape recorder that’s playing in my head when other people are talking. “Oh my God, when’s he going to stop? I’ve heard this a million times.”
Heintjes: So the megalomaniac inside Scott Adamsis revealed through Dogbert.
Adams: Yeah, we share a desire to conquer the earth and make everyone our slaves.
Heintjes: The new ruling class. To your mind, what is Dogbert’s role in the strip?
Adams: I’m not sure if it’s fair to analyze it after the fact. He was initially developed simply because Dilbert needed someone to talk to. And I like drawing dogs. I’ve been drawing dogs since I was little. As for his character, it didn’t make sense for me to have a character less powerful than Dilbert. It’s the basic, standard comedy convention to have a character be the opposite of what you’d expect. So making the little dog all-powerful just kind of came naturally. But people have read into it and seen some sort of brilliance on my part. [laughter]
I think what people like is that Dogbert always wins. He can get away with anything. There’s a reasonable chance that he’ll conquer the world, and he does it all through attitude. There’s nothing innate about him that is powerful. He doesn’t have control of a lot of money, and he doesn’t have size or physical strength. There’s just something about his attitude that allows him to win. People don’t identify with him—it’s just the opposite. It’s almost a fantasy experience.
Heintjes: You spend part of every day devising new ways to humiliate and degrade Dilbert. But do you like him?
Adams: Oh, yeah. He’d be a great guy to know. He’s kind and smart and wouldn’t hurt a fly. He’d be interesting if you could get past all the technical stuff. I can’t tell you how many Dilberts I know. I like them all.
Heintjes: Do you perceive parallels between Dilbert and Dogbert and an adult Charlie Brown and Snoopy? The cynical, worldly dog whose master is a good-hearted naïf?
Adams: I can look at my strip and identify a whole bunch of things that I’ve liked in the past. So there are two things that I can be certain of: the first thing is that I did not consciously ever sit down and make any similarities between Charlie Brown and Snoopy. The second thing is absolutely it’s true. There’s no question about it. You can’t look at it and see it, but it’s there. After all, I learned to read from Charlie Brown books. What are the chances of a complete coincidence? Pretty damned low.
Dilbert is also influenced by the characters Don Martin and Sergio Aragones created in Mad magazine. Some people ask me if I based Dilbert’s hair on Bart Simpson’s, and I tell them that Dilbert was created before Bart Simpson.
Heintjes: I guess we’ll have to ask Matt Groening if he’s a Dilbert reader. I wanted to ask you to talk in rough terms about the number of situations you lampoon in Dilbert that are based on reality versus the number you simply make up out of whole cloth.
Adams: I’d say roughly 80 percent of it is based on incidents people have suggested to me.
Heintjes: That’s pretty frightening, actually. Would a person typically be able to recognize his suggestion in the strip once you got done playing with it?
Adams: It’s funny. I won’t use a situation in a strip unless I’ve had the same sort of incident suggested to me at least twice. I look for patterns. But when I take one of these patterns and form it into a strip, I always get follow-ups from people saying, “Thank you for using my idea in your strip. I’ve told all my friends that you used my idea.” I never discourage them from thinking that. And sometimes, I’ll do a strip about something that did just happen to me, and then I’ll get e-mail from people thanking me for using their idea. [laughter] It’s probably a sign that I’m doing something right.
Heintjes: How do you structure your day? For the nearly a decade you spent at Pacific Bell, you must have had a highly structured routine.
Adams: The cartooning part of that decade was only six years or so, but for that time I did it pretty much the same way. I would do all of the creative part from five to six in the morning, and that would include thinking up the joke and penciling the strip. I would do that in an hour, no matter what. If at the end of 50 minutes I had nothing on the page, that day’s joke would be a ten-minute joke. The other discovery I made, which supports my earlier assertion about not trying to guess what other people think is funny, is that there rarely was a difference in quality between the 10-minute joke and the full hour’s joke. I like them equally. Once I got over that, I wasn’t scared of the 10-minute joke. Then, after I got home from work, I would do the inking and finishing.
Heintjes: You never did any Dilbert work on your lunch hour or during other times at Pacific Bell?
Adams: No, I never did.
Heintjes:I wonder why, since everyone else apparently was moonlighting.
Adams: Well, I couldn’t do the inking, because I would need the special equipment. And there was too much distraction for the creative part. It was just never an option.
Heintjes: What are your drawing tools?
Adams: I use a standard mechanical pencil, and for inking I use Alvin Penstix.
Heintjes: And you letter with Penstix as well?
Adams: I used to. For the last year and a half or so, I’ve been working with someone to do the lettering.
Heintjes: Is that right? He’s certainly duplicated your own style effectively.
Adams: Well, he’s a professional.
Heintjes: When do you work your Sunday strip into this structure?
Adams: I’ve always done my Sunday strip on Sunday mornings, for reasons I’ve never been able to explain except by saying that any other day would seem wrong. Partly, it’s the day when I have the most time to do it. By the end of the week I feel pretty beat up from all my other work. But I do a cartoon every day—Saturdays on Saturdays, Sundays on Sundays.
Heintjes: So you never have stretches where you’ll do all the writing for a week, then all the pencilling and finally all the inking?
Adams: No. In fact, I don’t do the writing before I do the drawing. I’m probably different from other cartoonists in the sense that I actually start drawing my first panel before I know how the strip’s going to end.
Heintjes: That’s a daily high dive.
Adams: Particularly if you have a time constraint. By the time you get to the end, you have to have confidence that you’ll be able to pull something out of your ass, because you don’t have time to go back. What works best for me is to have a theme, and there are just some themes that once I think about them, I say, “This could be funny.” So the first panel is always the set-up, explaining to the reader what the situation is. That one’s usually pretty straightforward. So I draw the first panel to see how much space I’ve got left over for the words, and I might change the words based on how much space I’ve got for them. Then I do the brainstorming—“what is it that’s going to be funny about this?” Is it going to be some horrible tragedy? A play on words? Whatever. Then I take advantage of the fact that I have the shortest attention span on the planet earth and a poor memory, and I begin to cycle through things. I can do this amazingly quickly, and I reject the things that don’t work. It feels almost physical, like a chamber of a gun being spun around during Russian roulette. Whirrr, click. Whirrr, click. Whirrr—hey, this one might work. Pow! [laughter] So I begin writing the rest when I feel like I have a good idea. And pretty much everything you see then is a first draft.
Heintjes: Your two Dogbert books—Build a Better Life by Stealing Office Supplies and Dogbert’s Clues for the Clueless—were composed of material that had never run in the paper before. So you simply doubled your workload while putting those books together?
Adams: During that time, I did one comic strip and one book page before I went to work in the morning. And those would both be in an hour.
Currently, I’m working from about six in the morning until about midnight each day. Yesterday was the first time that I sent my cartoon the day it was due. I think when I started Dilbert I was six months ahead, and I’ve been cutting into that a little bit at a time, like a savings account. And today, if not for the fact that I sent them by modem, I would have missed my deadline for the first time. So work and physical hygiene is about all I can manage these days.
Heintjes: You get most of your raw material sent to you via e-mail. Does this prevent you from ever coping with writer’s block?
Adams: I think writer’s block is when you say to yourself,“I could write something, but it wouldn’t be good enough.” There’s no such thing as a complete inability to write a sentence. At least I haven’t had that. But the great breakthrough for me is that I know that what I think will not necessarily be funny is going to make someone else fall out of his chair. I’ve learned the patterns, so if I’ve got a day when it’s just not coming, when I can’t see anything that makes me laugh, it doesn’t really stop me. Because I know the form at this point, and someone’s going to write me and say, “This is the finest joke you’ve ever done.” A good example of that was a joke done on the theme of how bosses come and go fairly quickly. So I thought I would do a cartoon on that, and I proceeded to do what I thought was the most uninspired cartoon of my life, which is nothing more than having a boss fly onscreen on a bungee cord, fly back off, and have Dilbert and Wally saying, “I think he made a difference. He was like a mentor to me.” When I drew that cartoon, I said, “You know, I really phoned this one in.” [laughter] But that is probably the most popular cartoon I’ve ever done. I knew it would work, it just wasn’t working for me. So you learn to get that extra sense of what other people are looking for.
One of the great discoveries about cartooning is something I learned when I first started. I believe there’s this thing called the “funny zone,” this universal thing that all people would recognize when they saw it. If you can take any situation and just move it into the “funny zone,” people will laugh. Once I learned that trick, everything changed. I found, for example, that if I do one cartoon that mentions ham-radio operators . . . I don’t know how many ham-radio operators there are in the country, but I think I’ve heard from every one of them. And one of the consistent things they would say is, “That was the funniest cartoon I’ve ever seen.” But the fact is, it just wasn’t. By any objective measure, it simply wasn’t inspired work. Further, they say, “I hadn’t read your strip, but since my friend sent it to me I read it every day, and your work is the finest since Michelangelo.”
Heintjes: So if you create strips that refer to every conceivable hobby, you eventually will be Charles Schulz.
Adams: You may notice that that’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m mentioning methodically all kinds of different careers until I hit most of the white-collar careers. Let’s say you’re a quality-assurance person in a software firm—how many popular references are there to your profession?
Heintjes: Probably zero.
Adams: But there are many, many people in that job.
Heintjes: So if you take just one day to shine a spotlight on them, they’re yours forever.
Adams: They’re mine forever. Then there’s a strange things that happens, sort of an afterglow effect that’s maybe unique to cartoons. If someone will laugh maybe once a week at your cartoon, they will think the other six days are funny, too. So if you can say something that will make the quality-assurance guys laugh once, they’ll think everything you do from that point on is funny. These are things that are not obvious to a beginning cartoonist. How could you possibly know that? It’s so counterintuitive.
Heintjes: Well, you’re a man with a plan, Scott.
Adams: That’s the quantitative side of me.
Heintjes: I would guess that the amount of e-mail you get is an affirmation of the universality of the themes you work with.
Adams: It has a number of benefits. Chief among them is that it helps me write the strip. When people write to me with their anecdotes, they often end it by saying, “Thank you—it’s been good therapy.” It’s often abundantly clear to me that they don’t expect me to use it in the cartoon, but there’s some sense that I alone understand. [laughter]
Heintjes: Do you receive e-mail from all over the world?
Adams: Every day from all over the world.
Heintjes: Are clueless managers identical the world over?
Adams: Absolutely identical. I have not found a single cultural difference from what’s been written to me. I should point out, though, that I don’t get much mail from Asia or Africa, for example, and they might have a different cultural management style. But as far as stories from Europe, Canada, Australia . . . they all have the same bureaucracies.
Heintjes: You were one of the earliest cartoonists to implement the power of the online services, specifically the Internet and the World Wide Web. Do you find that this has helped popularize the strip?
Adams: Yeah, hugely. I’m not sure it’s a technique that would work for other cartoonists. I obviously have a closer connection with the online crowd, by the nature of the strip. But the hardest part about selling into a new market is, you bring it into the editor, who really only has the ability to look at it and ask himself, “Do I think it’s funny?” But we kind of changed that equation. Now, the salesperson walks into the office almost anywhere in the United States, and the editor says, “Oh yeah—people have been calling and asking for this.” [laughter] And the only reason they can call and ask for it is because they’ve seen it on the Web. So we learned a few things. One is that it’s a tremendous marketing tool, far more than we had hoped for. Second, the Web stuff seems highly complementary to the newspaper, rather than cannibalizing from it, which we were worried about. We were careful about that. We make sure to run the strips online a week after they’ve run in the papers.
Heintjes: Do you get any especially strange or humorous e-mail, apart from the usual anti-manager tirades?
Adams: I get some amazingly humorous stuff. One letter I got made me fall out of my chair, clutching my stomach for an hour, I was laughing so hard. I’m not sure it’ll translate when I tell it, though, but the basic idea was that these people had moved into a new computer area, taking over a room that had been used for something else—a furnace room, or something. There was a big red button on the wall with a sign that said, “Do not press this button.” Well, they all naturally assumed that this button had nothing to do with their operation, that this button was a relic from the older use of the room. So it became a tradition for one of the guys on Friday, on the way out for the weekend, to hit the button. That was his personal way of signifying that the weekend had started. In fact, he trained one of the summer co-op employees to do the same thing if he wasn’t there. They found out much later that what they were doing was shutting down the computer and furnace systems to the building, causing somebody in another department to go into manual mode, spending hours trying to correct the problem.
Heintjes: [laughing] This happened once a week?
Adams: Not only once a week, but at five o’clock on Friday! Of course, they couldn’t figure out what was wrong, because there was no logical reason for it to be happening! It says so much about people, that they had to keep pressing a button that says “Do not press.”
Heintjes: Have you even wondered how different your entire life might be had you not caught the end of that Jack Cassady show?
Adams: I think about that all the time. It’s one of the great unresolved questions of my life. Could I have been successful in a corporation? I truly think that by now I would have been a fairly high-level manager and made more money than I do now. But I started doing cartooning just when I was most promotable, and the more I cartooned, the less promotable I became. I’ll never know. It’s a great mystery to me.
Heintjes: Let’s suppose that a couple of centuries from now, anthropologists unearth a time capsule containing nothing but Dilbert strips. What would they conclude about life in late twentieth-century America?
Adams: They’ll look at us in the same way we look at stories of workers during the Industrial Revolution. “My God, they worked 16-hour days and fought traffic for two hours a day—how did they live like that?” They’ll talk about people living like that with no possibility of a raise, no budgets to work with and no real prospects for improvement, and they’ll say, “Can you believe people lived like that before we tightened up the laws?” I’m not exaggerating—I am saying what I believe is absolutely true. They’ll look at us with a great deal of pity.

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