e-Talk Radio: Aguiar, Mauricio, 26 September 2000

then try to fit words into a witty acronym.

Mauricio: Yeah, it's true. And words are really important, like you can have a word like "power." That's a really powerful word. And you might use it in an acronym. And it has an effect on people, you know. And that's why acronyms are important. And at the same time, that's why Dilbert is not necessarily the truth, because if it were the truth, then you would say, "Okay, so we won't make any decisions about acronyms anymore." That's not the truth, either. That's what it says about boundaries. The boundary is something that makes you, in fact, makes you think. In fact, you know those Zen puzzles, like, "What's the sound of one hand clapping?" I think Dilbert is a kind of Western Zen, you know.

Carol: That's a really interesting perspective, that I'm sure Scott Adams would kind of appreciate that. That almost has a religious overtone. One thing that kind of hit me is… Do we respond to Dilbert, or do you think that Dilbert actually is changing… Does it have an effect? Does anything that's written in Dilbert cartoons or in books, does that really have an effect to change the way people react?

Mauricio: I think it will sometimes. It started as a reflection of what people actually do. I think that what happened with Scott Adams is he spent 17 years in a cubicle, and then he started writing about what he had experienced. But then, you also have the effect… The effect becomes the cause for other people. So people will read the Dilbert stories, and they'll understand their roles in the workplace. And they will draw those boundaries I was talking about, and maybe they'll start improving based on what originally was for laughs only. That's the beauty of it.

Carol: We have to take another quick break, but we will be back shortly and continue talking about the Dilbert Society with Mauricio Aguiar and Carol Dekkers.

Welcome back to Quality Plus e-Talk! We've been talking a little bit with… talking about the Dilbert Society. My background is as President of Quality Plus Technologies, which is a management consulting firm, where we specialize in successful implementation of software measurement, primarily for the software industry. So we're consultants, we go in and we tell people how to build better software. I'm involved in a lot of different organizations, such as the American Society for Quality, the Quality Assurance Institute, the international function point users' group, and involved in ISO standards. And my guest today, I'm very fortunate to have Mauricio Aguiar, who is a senior software manager with CAIXA Economica Federal, which is a leading Brazilian government bank with over 2,000 branches. His background includes a professional engineering designation. He's a systems analyst with a master's degree in neurolinguistic programming. And I can't think of anybody else who would be better qualified to discuss our topic today, which is the Dilbert Society. Why has Scott Adams' cartoon really pervaded and flourished, through books, presentations, and in multiple languages? Mauricio visits us here today from Rio de Janeiro, where he has lived, worked, and been part of, essentially, Brazilian Dilbert Society. So I'd like to welcome you back to the show. And we were talking a little bit about whether we should have process improvement, whether we should abandon process improvement. We've talked about that in the last half-hour. And we've talked a little bit about whether Dilbert leads or follows the industry. And we were talking about some of the favorite strips, in terms