Fix a Dilbert a Day

Scott Adam’s Dilbert cartoon strip was launched in 1989. Ever since then we have been entertained by the foibles Dilbert found in everyday corporate life. What may or may not be surprising, depending on your point of view, is that the things that we laughed about for all of those cartoons with Dilbert over the year are still true today.

Dilbert has been brilliant in pointing out areas of waste within corporations. Any collection of Dilbert cartoons provides an excellent portrayal of the non-value added activities within any organization. With such succinct and accurate problem descriptions, you’d think that since 1989 companies would have made more progress towards eliminating all that waste.

Now would be a good time to reverse this trend. With global competition, what organization can afford to waste over 50% of its resources on non-value added activities? Dilbert is proof that most still do. Eliminating the wastes highlighted by Dilbert will help produce greater stakeholder value at less cost and higher quality.

Scott Adams has not yet run out of new material; new Dilbert cartoons are published every day. Imagine the impact if an organization maintained a prioritized list of Dilbert Cartoons as a backlog for performance improvements, and then worked off the backlog day after day. Waste would be eliminated. There would be no need for expensive analysis, pareto charts, or whatever to discover how to improve performance. Just fix a Dilbert a day.

Updated August 22, 2010; first published September 13, 2005