The following was circulated on the Organization Theory network. I thought
many of the MG-ED subscribers would find them intersting.
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A magazine recently ran a "Dilbert Quotes" contest. They were looking for
people to submit quotes from their real-life Dilbert-type managers. Here
are some of the submissions:
1. As of tomorrow, employees will only be able to access the building using
individual security cards. Pictures will be taken next Wednesday and
employees will receive their cards in two weeks. (This was the winning
entry; Fred Dales at Microsoft Corporation in Redmond, WA)
2. What I need is a list of specific unknown problems we will encounter.
(Lykes Lines Shipping)
3. How long is this Beta guy going to keep testing our stuff? (Programming
intern, Microsoft IIS Development team)
4. E-mail is not to be used to pass on information or data. It should be
used only for company business. (Accounting Mgr., Electric Boat Company)
5. This project is so important, we can't let things that are more
important interfere with it. (Advertising/Mktg. Mgr., UPS)
6. Doing it right is no excuse for not meeting the schedule. No one will
believe you solved this problem in one day! We've been working on it for
months. Now, go act busy for a few weeks and I'll let you know when it's
time to tell them. (R&D Supervisor, Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing /3M
Corp.)
7. My boss spent the entire weekend retyping a 25-page proposal that only
needed corrections. She claims the disk I gave her was damaged and she
couldn't edit it. The disk I gave her was write-protected. (CIO of Dell
Computers)
8. Quote from the boss: "Teamwork is a lot of people doing what 'I' say."
(Mktg. executive, Citrix Corporation)
9. My sister passed away and her funeral was scheduled for Monday. When I
told my boss, he said she died so that I would have to miss work on the
busiest day of the year. He then asked if we could change her burial to
Friday. He said, "That would be better for me." (Shipping Executive, FTD
Florists)
10. We know that communication is a problem, but the company is not going
to discuss it with the employees. (AT&T Lone Lines Division)
11. We recently received a memo from senior management saying, "This is to
inform you that a memo will be issued today regarding the subject mentioned
above." (Microsoft, Legal Affairs Division)
12. One day my boss asked me to submit a status report to him concerning a
project I was working on. I asked him if tomorrow would be soon enough. He
said, "If I wanted it tomorrow, I would have waited until tomorrow to ask
for it!" (New Business Mgr., Hallmark Cards)
13.As director of communications, I was asked to prepare a memo reviewing
our company's training programs and materials. In the body of the memo one
of the sentences mentioned the "pedagogical approach" used by one of the
training manuals. The day after I routed the memo to the executive
committee, I was called into the HR Director's office, and was told that
the executive VP wanted me out of the building by lunch. When I asked why,
I was told that she wouldn't stand for "perverts" (pedophiles?) working in
her company. Finally he showed me her copy of the memo, with her demand
that I be fired, with the word "pedagogical" circled in red. The HR
Manager was fairly reasonable, and once he looked the word up in his
dictionary and made a copy of the definition to send to my boss, he told
me not to worry. He would take care of it. Two days later a memo to the
entire staff came out, directing us that no words which could not be
found in the local Sunday newspaper could be used in company memos. A
month later, I resigned. In accordance with company policy, I created my
resignation letter by pasting words together from the Sunday paper. (Taco
Bell Corporation)
14.This gem is the closing paragraph of a nationally-circulated memo from
a large communications company:" Lucent Technologies is endeavorily
determined to promote constant attention on current procedures of
transacting business focusing emphasis on innovative ways to better, if
not supercede, the expectations of quality!"
Dilbert fans may be interested in reading the interview (with cartoons), of
Scott Adams that appeared in the Journal of Management Inquiry, 5(3):
207-213. JMI is published by Sage, and is unique among Academic journals
in that it regularly publishs papers by practitioners in one of its six
sections (Essays, Meet the Person, Reflections on Experience,
Nontraditional Research; Reviews; and Dialog). Below is a copy of the
Table of contents for the September, 1998 issue.
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JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT INQUIRY
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Volume 7, Number 3 September 1998
CONTENTS
Breaking the Frame Award-Volume 6
Meet the Person
Editor's Introduction
CHARLES M. VANCE
Leadership through Compassion and Understanding:
An Interview with Aung San Suu Kyi
JUDITH A. WHITE
Essays
Editors' Introduction
DEBORAH DOUGHERTY AND RAYMOND ALDAG
Some Ideological Foundations of Organizational Downsizing
WILLIAM MCKINLEY, MARK A. MONE and VICENT BARKER III
Nontraditional Research
Editors' Introduction
KAREN GOLDEN-BIDDLE AND DEBORAH DOUGHERTY
Space Stories; Or, Studying Museum Building as Organizational Spaces, while
Reflecting on Interpretive Methods and their Narration
DVORA YANOW
Editor's Choice
Editor's Introduction
KIMBERLY B. BOAL
Making Sense of Managerial Wisdom
LEON-C MALAN and MARK P. KRIGER
Diversity Dilemmas at Work
MEG A. BOND and JEAN L. PYLE
Commentary on the Internet
Cyberia
DWIGHT LEMKE
About the Authors
--------------------------------
Kim Boal
College of Business Administration
Texas Tech University
Lubbock, TX 79409
(806) 742-2150
KimBoal@ttu.edu
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Kim Boal
College of Business Administration
Texas Tech University
Lubbock, TX 79409
(806) 742-2150
KimBoal@ttu.edu