QUALITY AND RELIABILITY ENGINEERING INTERNATIONAL, VOL. 13, 1 (1997)

EDITORIAL

Q&R AND THE DILBERT PRINCIPLE

If asked to list the people who have made the most ‘initiatives’ and ‘paradigms’, and he wonders whyexperience, commonsense and leadership don’t countimportant contributions to quality and reliability, and

to the art of management, names such as Drucker, any more. He makes irreverent but sagacious com-ments on ISO9000. He sees emperors proudly parad-Deming, Shewhart, Crosby, Ishikawa, Taguchi, and

Imai are among those that will come to the minds ing in their invisible cloaks, and proclaims theirnakedness.of most engineers working at the leading edge of

technology and Q&R achievement. Of course others Q&R are not specialist, esoteric aspects of engin-eering and management. Specialist methods arewho have made significant contributions in specialist

areas, such as accelerated test methods, IC testing, applied, but ultimately the achievement of productexcellence is the culmination of excellent manage-and failure data analysis, might also be mentioned.

However, there is another name that is becoming ment. Management of people is the foundation ofall world-class quality, reliability and productivity,widely known and respected: Dilbert. Dilbert is the

cartoon character invented by Scott Adams, and the and this means treating people as people, not as‘operatives’ or as components of a ‘system’. Thissubject of the bestselling bookThe Dilbert Prin-

ciple.* Dilbert is the archetypical office worker who is, of course, not an original observation: the teach-ers listed above have all pronounced it. What is sadis the observer and commentator, and sometimes the

victim, of the management practices applied in many is the extent to which the lessons go unheeded,and the consequent loss of morale, productivity andworkplaces. He represents the ordinary working

people who are reorganized, downsized, re- happiness of so many ‘Dilberts’. This loss inevitablyextends to the businesses for which they work,engineered, audited, measured against KPIs, and

generally subjected to the whims, fashions and especially over the long term.Add Dilbert to your list of important reading.incompetencies that pervade much of the modern

management scene. Dilbert sees consultants in smart You will laugh, and you will learn (if you do notalready know) how a lot of modern managementsuits expensively telling top management what their

workers knew all along, or creating changes for practice is viewed by the real experts.other consultants to change later. He has an instinc-tive and rational scepticism of ‘vision statements’, Patrick O’Connor

* The Dilbert Principle, Scott Adams, Harper Collins NewYork, 1996.

1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.