Category Archives: Books

Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel

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I’ve spent the last few minutes of the last few nights on my back laughing so hard tears trickled down to my ears. I’m highlighting my way through Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel by Scott Adams.

“You can ignore almost everything that is asked of you and in the long run it won’t matter. Either the tasks will become moot or your boss will forget what he asked you to do, or someone else will do it.” Or, “If you stall long enough, every corporate initiative ends, even layoffs.”

I particularly enjoyed the description an encounter with a salesman for a local radio station that was trying to convince Adams to buys advertising for the resturant he co-owns. Adams asked the sales person how many listeners the radio station had.

“The sales weasel explained, ‘You have to spend money to make money.’ I pointed out that he probably knew the number of listeners and that I could decide on my own if it was worth knowing. The weasel responded by explaining how many human beings lived within listening range of his station, i.e. weaselmath. I asked how that mattered if they weren’t actually listening, just potentially listening.”

“Then he explained that it’s much more expensive to advertise on other radio stations on a cost-per-relevlant-listener basis. I asked how he knew that if he didn’t know how many listeners he had.”

“He explained to me that some of my competitors were advertising on his station and they must be getting some benefit or they wouldn’t be doing it. I pointed out that most of my competitors weren’t advertising on his station and if not advertising wasn’t working, they wouldn’t be doing it. It wasn’t a good meeting.”

God help us if radio listening ever becomes as brutally measurable as the Web.

Enough Rope

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Enough Rope is a collection of “short fiction” (not sure how this differs from short stories) by Lawrence Block. He manages to write about death without bumming me out. Favorites include Batman’s Helpers; The Merciful Angel of Death and Out the Window. Ed Gorman writes a much better review of the collection.

The Torrent

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“Picture a very swift torrent, a river rushing down between rocky walls. There is a long, shallow bar of sand and gravel that runs right down the middle of the river. It is under water. You are born and you have to stand on that narrow, submerged bar, where everyone stands. The ones born before you, the ones older than you, are upriver from you. The younger one stand braced on the bar downriver. And the whole long bar is slowly moving down that river of time, washing away at the upstream end and building up downstream.

Your time, the time of all your contemporaries, schoolmates, your loves and your adversaries, is that part of the shifting bar on which you stand. And it is crowded at first. You can see the way it thins out, upstream from you. The old ones are washed away and their bodies go swiftly buy, like logs in the current. Downstream where the younger ones stand thick, you can see them flounder, lose footing, wash away. Always there is more room where you stand, but always the swift water grows deeper, and you feel the shift of the sand and the gravel under your feet as the river wears it away. Someone looking for a safer place to stand can nudge you off balance, and you are gone. Someone who has stood beside you for a long time gives a forlorn cry and you reach to catch their hand, but the fingertips slide away and they are gone. There are the sounds in the rocky gorge, the roar of the water, the shifting, gritty sound of the sand and the gravel underfoot, the forlorn cries of despair as the nearby ones, and the ones upstream, are taken by the current. Some old ones who stand on a good place, well braced, understanding currents and balance, last a long time. Far downstream from you are the thin, startled cries of the ones who never got planted, never got set, never quite understood the message of the torrent.”

–From John D. MacDonald’s Pale Gray for Guilt

An Anti-Inspirational Guide to Adulthood

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Want to send that new grad out there with a feel for what’s really waiting? Give him/her a copy of Sarah Montague’s You Can Be Anything! From A to Z. An Anti-Inspirational Guide to Adulthood. They’re all pretty good but here’s a couple of my favorites:

Fiona is a Failure. Her husband left her for a younger woman. She wasn’t good enough at making him happy and she wasn’t pretty enough to make him stay. Are you good enough so people won’t leave you?! (I hope so!)

Zeke is a Zookeeper. He works forty hours plus overtime at the zoo. He is very quiet and keeps to himself. The thinks the animals speak to him in a secret language. Like when the monkeys throw their feces, they might be saying, “Zeke, we like you best!” Do you like animals?

We are immune to advertising (Cluetrain Manifesto)

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“The only advertising that was ever really effective was word of mouth, which is nothing more than conversation.” Just read The Cluetrain Manifesto. Oh my. I don’t know where to begin. Maybe a few more quotes.

“The memo is dead. Long live e-mail.” At our company, senior management insists on emailing company-wide memos as Word attachments. Search me.

“Suppose you removed the table from your conference room and replaced the seats with armchairs. Suppose you turned it into a living room. How much would this affect your meetings? That’s how much your meetings are about power, not communication.”

“How will we be smart in a world where it’s easier to look something up than to know it?”

The last management book I read was The Dilbert Principle. I thought it was the last I’d need. But that’s misleading. Cluetrain is not a management book. It’s… well, it’s about the Web. “Our longing for the Web is rooted in the deep resentment we feel toward being managed. However much we long for the Web is how much we hate our job.”