With two fledgling side ventures, though, Adams is inching perilously close to the cliff’s edge. To launch a line of meatless, vitamin-packed burritos called the Dilberito–likely to show up in grocery stores in the next month or so–he set up Scott Adams Foods and hired a food-industry consultant, Jack Parker, as its lone executive. And last year Adams opened his own eatery, Stacey’s Cafe, in Pleasanton, Calif. A former restaurant manager, Stacey Linkhart, is running it.
Are they his (gasp) employees? Adams shudders at the suggestion. To be a boss, he points out, you have to be able to fire people, or at least have the power to inspire fear of being fired. But Parker has an employment contract and a stake in the business. With the restaurant, Adams put up the capital, but Linkhart is an equal partner. Still, Adams has had to engage in a lot of bosslike conversations to get these projects off the ground. And guess what? The funniest critic of management sounds like he would be a pretty good manager himself.
Adams, who supervised a few people during his cubicle-dwelling years in corporate America, thinks that 80 percent of good management is hiring the right people, and the other 20 percent is getting out of their way. Adams relied on serendipity to find Parker and Linkhart. After Adams mentioned his half-baked idea for a nutritionally complete burrito in an article a few years ago, a reader sent him an e-mail (he posts his address, scottadams@aol.com, in his strip) suggesting he contact Parker. Parker was intrigued by Adams’s idea. “I didn’t know at the time whether it could be done,” he says. “If you think about the food pyramid, how do you squish all that down into something that isn’t as big as your head or your desk?”
Adams and his live-in girlfriend, Pam Okasaki, who go out to dinner just about every night, met Linkhart while she was waiting tables. They chatted regularly through the years, and Linkhart, who moved up to restaurant manager, mentioned to Adams that she was saving money to open her own place. Adams extended the same offer he has made to dozens of people: write up a business plan, and he might finance it (post-Dilbert, whenever that is, Adams predicts he will spend a lot of his time starting companies). Linkhart was the first person to take him up on his offer. “He gave me a great opportunity,” she says. “He changed my life.”
So what’s it like to work for–scratch that–with Dilbert’s dad? Adams says a key management tool is the interrogation method. “Rather than saying, ‘You want to do it that way, and I want to do it this way,’ I go through a series of logical questions, and if you’re dealing with the same information, two rational people will always get the same result.”
Sometimes, though, they don’t. That happened with Linkhart’s proposal to have a huge mural of a restaurant scene painted along one wall of the cafe. Adams almost winced at the idea becase he thought it would be corny. But he gave in, and the mural is a big hit with customers. Adams says he at least had the wisdom to stay out of it. “If I can’t see it, I’m going to go with the person who is sure,” he says. Linkhart says she is always open to Adams’s suggestions. “He has a way of making you see things from a different angle.”
Starting up the Dilberito project was a lot trickier. Adams, who pursued the idea because he found most food surprisingly lacking in nutrition, needed help. He hired Parker initially as a consultant. But Adams said he knew from their first phone calls (to this day, they’ve never met in person) that they would work well together. “Everything that came out of his mouth sounded completely reasonable and rational,” Adams says. “That sounds completely ordinary. But it’s very rare. In the real world, people often babble.”
After some initial research by Parker, Adams decided that the Dilberito was worth a $1 million investment. Parker signed up as the lone employee of Scott Adams Foods, although Adams likes to think of Parker as an employee in the same way that Bill Gates is an employee of Microsoft. (Adams thinks big. He hopes the Dilberito will change the way people think about food.) They work on opposite coasts–Parker in New Jersey and Adams in California–and Adams keeps his distance in more ways than one. Adams, after all, believes in taking advantage of others’ expertise. He gave Parker free rein to come up with the right mixture of ingredients, for example. “I try whenever I can to make it clear that whatever they produce is going to be the final thing. Otherwise, no one will ever do anything up to the best of their ability if they know you are going to change it anyway.”
He’s also a fan of explaining decisions. No matter what bosses do, employees will typically think it’s the wrong course of action. Often they’re right, of course, but a lot of the time the boss is simply using different information. A case in point: Adams thought the Dilberito should deliver 100 percent of the recommended daily intake of vitamins and minerals, even though other meals of the day would provide at least some nutritional value. But Adams always assumes that simpler is better, and that promising 100 percent of something would appeal to consumers. It made Parker’s job harder, but he agreed with Adams’s logic. “I’m kind of a maniac about making sure that people would come to the same decision I would,” Adams says.
As business relationships go, it all sounds pretty rosy. Still, there are those messy little details that have to be worked out, like compensation and vacation. Adams hands off a lot of that stuff–anything where emotions are likely to come into play–to his lawyer. And in Parker’s case, there’s a boilerplate clause in his employment contract calling for Adams to give him a performance review at some point. But don’t expect that to ever make it onto Adams’s to-do list. “I think by mutual agreement, we’ll avoid that,” he says. You won’t hear any complaints from Parker: “I’ve worked for the pointy-haired boss, and that’s not Scott Adams.”
