06/03/03’s illustrious band:

Weasonable Doubt

Brought to you by Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams in the audio version of his book Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel, which I’ve been listening to in the car.

Adams' theory, well grounded in cube-farm cynicism, is that everyone involved in the business world is a weasel. Weasels are goldbrickers who want to reap the maximum reward, or at least stay employed, while putting forth minimum effort. They’ll do anything to weasel out of responsibility. If a weasel has to lie, misdirect, or cast blame onto others to meet this goal, he will.

That's where the concept of weasonable doubt comes in. If a coworker (or boss or stockholder) accuses a weasel of dropping the ball on a project, the weasel will cast doubt upon the other party’s competence rather than his own. The weasel will say something like, "I sent you the info. Didn't you get it?" or "I must have forgotten to remind you of the deadline" -- implying that it's someone else who goofed, not the weasel. (See also “passing the buck.”)

One of my favorite segments so far is one in which Adams points out that in large companies, employees are not viewed as people, but as headcount, and headcount exists for the primary purpose of supporting the quality of managers’ furniture. That is to say, the greater the headcount in a manager’s department, the nicer the furniture he will have. This is encouraging news for work-dodging weasels because it means it’s in the manager’s best interest to keep them on staff so he can maintain his furniture quality. It doesn’t matter whether the weasels are productive or not, as long as they stick around to justify the manager’s purchase of a nice chair.

Adams also points out the fallacy of management advice books -- like the ones Way of the Weasel parodies. If management books were actually any good, he reasons, everyone who read one would become a great manager, and we’d have no need for such books any more. The fact that businesspeople keep publishing and buying more of them actually proves their uselessness. This kind of thinking makes my brain hurt, but being a bit of a weasel myself, I’ll just ignore it and move on.

This audiobook is very funny. Part of the humor comes from recognizing one’s own workplace in the corporate victims Adams skewers; anyone who’s ever worked for, with or near another human being will find something to identify with. And part of the amusement comes from the stilted delivery of the author himself as he reads the book on tape. He has a tendency to swallow the ends of his words and take awkward pauses (something I think the recording engineer could have remedied), almost as if he was trying to weasel out of the job of reading. Adams is a better cartoonist than vocal actor, but I won’t hold that against him when he’s making my commute enjoyable.

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