To: Tempo Subcommittee on
De-Corporatizing the Tribune
From: Julia Keller, Tribune cultural critic
Dear Colleagues:
As you know, we have a serious problem here at the Tribune. While we put out a high-quality, award-winning journalistic product, we have somehow become saddled with a public image of staid stuffiness, of an excessively fussy and pedantic corporate ambience in which Queen Victoria (1819-1901; ruler of Great Britain and Ireland, 1837-1901; empress of India, 1876-1901) herself would feel at home.
Hence my attempt to make this place more “hip” and “cool” and “street” and “bad” and less “uptight.” (I have verified the use of these words in this context via the 2002 edition of the International Dictionary of Colloquial Slang and Casual Euphemisms, Volume 12, No. 4, co-edited by Harvard University professor Adelbert R. Parkhurst IV and LL Cool J.)
Pursuant to this effort, I contacted the best corporate consultant I could think of: Scott Adams, creator of the “Dilbert” comic strip, which relentlessly ridicules bureaucratic idiocy, management buffoonery and the lockstep corporate march. Adams was available because, as it happens, he’s in the midst of a seven-city tour to promote his new book, “Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel” (HarperBusiness).
As Adams and I toured Tribune Tower on a recent day, I asked him to recommend ways to change the Tribune’s reputation as a prim, grim, gray, sterile, soulless workplace with interchangeable employees who speak with a single bland, conservative, robotic voice.
Adams’ initial assessment: “It’s hopeless.”
Undaunted, we entered the newsroom. Adams’ practiced eye roved over the sea of beige, cookie-cutter cubicles at which workers sat. (I crisply informed Adams that what he refers to as “cubicles” are actually known at the Tribune as “approved workstations shorn of individuating ornament.” I further informed him that what he calls “workers” or, more specifically, “writers” and “editors,” are known at the Tribune as “non-revenue-producing carbon units with delusions of uniqueness.”)
Adams’ method of judging a problematic workplace is based on a dense and intricate mathematical model: “I look at the ratio of cubicles to people. Right now, I’m seeing 16 cubicles and three employees, and one of those employees is obviously having a personal conversation.”
Instead of regarding that as a negative, however, Adams saw it as evidence of initiative. “The smarter employees leave little signs in their cubicles that indicate they’ll ‘be right back.’ I had a co-worker once who would put a pair of reading glasses at his desk in the morning and then go home.” He pointed to a coat hung on the back of a chair. “Clearly, this man has two coats.”
Part of the Tribune’s problem, Adams said, was the skimpy height of the cubicle walls. “Even my cubicle had walls higher than this.”
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His cubicle, back in the long-ago time when Adams was just another cog in capitalism’s machine, was at a San Francisco bank and then a phone company. In 1989, he turned his doodles of a bespectacled bald guy trapped in the corporate gulag into a comic strip. “Dilbert,” which chronicles the absurdity of the modern workplace and its preponderance of weaselly behavior in upper management is now carried in more than 2,000 newspapers. Dilbert products — desktop calendars, T-shirts, coffee mugs — have made millions for Adams. Four previous Dilbert books have been best sellers.
For all that, Adams, 45, still blends into the corporate environment with spooky ease. Calm, soft-spoken, he was dressed in a neatly pressed black turtleneck, black leather jacket and dark gray pants that looked suspiciously fashionable for the creator of a chunky loser such as Dilbert.
“It’s for TV,” Adams explained apologetically. “Most days, I’m a pajamas-till-2-p.m. kind of guy.”
Handed a copy of Red Eye, the Tribune’s new youth-oriented publication, Adams turned the pages slowly and thoughtfully. Asked if a 25-year-old Scott Adams would have picked it up, Adams replied, “I would’ve picked it up if I thought 25-year-old girls would be impressed that I read it.”
Adams took a short break in his observations to demonstrate how to sleep undetected in a cubicle, to wit:
Drop a pencil on the floor, then place the forehead on the front edge of the desk, letting the arms dangle. Snooze. Should someone come along and call your name, continue reaching for the pencil as if engaged in a single seamless motion.
If more staffers exhibited that sort of creative behavior, Adams said, the Tribune could actually become known as a slackers’ paradise, as the kind of place at which truly trendy people would want to be employed in order to goof off.
He peered at the large world map on the wall, his eyes zeroing in on the Middle East. “OK, it’s Iran and not Persia. Good,” he said, but seemed vaguely disappointed, as if a hipper workplace would have sported retro maps, ironic in their inaccuracy.
On the floor housing feature writers and critics, Adams was a bit more encouraged. He paused at one cubicle that looked as if it had pulled an all-nighter and desperately needed a shave and perhaps fumigation.
“This might be the most impressively bad cubicle of all time,” he said. “There’s gotta be cats in here somewhere.”
Introduced to a relatively new staff member working in her cubicle, Adams said cheerfully, “Do you feel the life force being sucked out of you yet?”
For purposes of contrast, I took Adams to the tri-level basement offices in Tribune Tower, opened last year after an 18th-month remodel to accommodate Tribune Interactive. Here all was slick and sleek and futuristic, with curving desks and cool black cabinets and ergonomically approved chairs and exposed brick and the occasional cobalt blue wall.
Adams was stunned. “This,” he said, eyes glazing over with admiration, “is actually where the world is being run. This looks like where James Bond would have his final fight with the evil genius.”
Had he worked in conditions such as these, Adams’ stupefaction implied, he might never have created Dilbert as an escape from the land of lost souls, a.k.a. the typical corporate workplace.
When it comes to dealing with the Tribune rank and file, Adams had a strategy he recommended that all managers immediately implement:
“False hope. You can lie about the future, and it’s called optimism — and it’s a virtue.”
So we must carry on, Tempo colleagues, in our noble attempt to make the Tribune less stolid and turgid and buttoned-down, to induce our co-workers to loosen up and lighten up, to stop and smell the roses, to let the sunshine in, and at some point in the not-too-distant future, to stop using cliches — although I wouldn’t bet the ranch.