Scott Adam’s Dilbert cartoon strip was launched in 1989. For sixteen years 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 sixteen years ago with Dilbert 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 producing activities within any company. With such succinct and accurate problem descriptions, you’d think that in sixteen years corporations could have made more progress developing solutions.
There couldn’t be a better time to reverse this disturbing trend. With today’s global competition, what corporation can afford to waste 50% of its resources on non-value added activities? Dilbert is proof that most do. Eliminating the wastes highlighted by Dilbert will help create a high performance organization that produces 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 a corporation just committed to taking a corrective action for each day’s new Dilbert cartoon. No need for expensive analysis to discover what to do next to increase performance. Just fix a Dilbert a day.
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