The Globe and Mail

Scott Adams has earned himself, and his Dilbert comic strip, a place in the history of work.

Frustrated engineers, IT workers and other cubicle slaves turn to Dilbert for a little release from the oft-frustrating world of work. Adams also regularly receives suggestions from his readers, some of which make it into the strip. That feedback has helped keep him in touch with the workplace.

Aside from being a very funny interview, he's often perceptive about office life. A recent Fortune interview with him offers some interesting insights. The full article is here; some highlights are below.

Q. In what specific ways has the average workplace gotten worse since you started drawing Dilbert?

A. One thing that's definitely worse is that employers have a much greater ability to monitor employees' every move. They can count the keystrokes on your computer, keep track of where you go on the Internet, and so on. It's creepy. But the big macro change now is, employers are a lot nicer when the economy is strong, because they know you have choices and can go elsewhere if they don't keep you happy. When times are bad, the gloves come off and employers are less nice. People become disposable.

Q. Is there any advice you'd like to give any human resources people who might be reading this?

A. I try to avoid giving advice. But I wrote a book a while ago called The Dilbert Principle, about how I think the ideal workplace would be organized. If you don't have a lot of money to give people, then give them two other things. One is flexibility. Allow people to have a life outside of work. Does an employee have a reasonable chance of leaving the office on time, which I define as 5 p.m.? I mean, is that extra hour or two or three that people put in, in the evening, really necessary? And second, give them at least half an hour every day to learn something they don't already know. Lots of surveys of employee happiness show that keeping people happy in their jobs really isn't so much about money anyway, it's about these other things that many companies don't think to offer. Work is like the rest of life. The best parts are free.

Q. Is it just my imagination, or are many of the people at the very top of huge corporations really dumber than they were 20 years ago?

A. The goal of the people at the top now is to create what I call confusopolies. The barriers to entry to almost any business are so low now - any company can get into any business, just invest some capital and get your product made cheaply in China or somewhere - so everything is basically a commodity. So you have to make your product so complicated that people will pay more for it, just because they are awed by the complexity of it. This is what happened on Wall Street. You know, before the big meltdown, somebody asked Warren Buffett to explain how certain derivatives and credit-default swaps worked and he said he didn't understand them - and, although he was too modest to say so, what he was implying was that, if he didn't understand them, then nobody did. Well, that turned out to be true. The big investment banks were the ultimate confusopolies.