Scott Adams’ (Very) Public Wake

Scott Adams did more than create a popular cartoon that spoke to a generation of office workers. source: Art of Charm, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s a popular Hollywood trope: a “dead” man lives to see his own funeral. He’s fascinated by the reactions of those around him. Sometimes, he’s pleasantly surprised. Sometimes sorrowfully depressed. Sometimes downright angry. Depending on the movie, it’s either a fake death or a supernatural out-of-body experience.

As with most things, it all depends on what you’re watching.

And that, in a nutshell, summarizes the wisdom of Scott Adams.

The popular cartoonist—an ex-engineer with an MBA—turned his front-line experience into a practical philosophy, one useful both in business and in life. A trained hypnotist, he became a serious student of persuasion. He then blossomed into a master scholar. Of course, it was only a matter of time that his expansive talent stack would get him into trouble.

In 2015, long before the usual chattering class, Adams used his persuasion lens to quickly conclude that Donald Trump would not only win the Republican nomination but also take the presidency.

Like Trump, no one took the creator of Dilbert seriously. To most people, Adams was just a cartoonist. What did he know about politics—about elections, voters, or their behavior?

Ah, there’s that word. “Behavior.” All persuasion is predicated on it.

If you want people to move in a certain direction, you need to understand their tendencies. Great salesmen know this.

Trump, despite all his ventures, is an unabashed salesman. And he’s not modest about it. In fact, he wrote a best-selling book about it. (You might be interested to know that Trump’s The Art of the Deal and Lee Iacocca’s autobiography were required reading in one of my Simon School marketing classes.)

Adams was aware of Trump’s book. In persuasion terms, it wasn’t as subtle as Cialdini’s published research. But it clearly belonged in the same category. Perhaps if his 2015 primary opponents had studied these books, Trump would not have blindsided them.

Not only did Scott Adams study these books, but he also ran a commentary on their use throughout the 2016 presidential campaign. Each blog represented a practical lesson in marketing—lessons they never taught in business school.

Why not? Back in the 1980s, business schools were the academic equivalent of the cubicle farms Adams roasted in his daily comic strip.

Do you remember the first time you read Dilbert? It was an unspoken secret passed between those cubicles, always out of your boss’s sight. They were that good. So good that major metropolitan newspapers had no choice but to print the strip. Indeed, reading Dilbert every day was one of the two reasons I kept subscribing to the Democrat and Chronicle (the other being the crossword puzzle).

While I found Dilbert entertaining, I didn’t think it was as edgy as Bloom County or as intellectual as Calvin & Hobbes. But by the mid-1990s, both had retired from the funny pages. Only Dilbert remained.

By then, however, Adams had expanded beyond the funny pages and into books. These weren’t mere reprints of the daily comic, but books that interpreted his humor and reframed it into business lessons. Not that his first foray was any great shakes. It was unique largely because it was based on a cartoon. The lessons themselves were the same-old, same-old—at least for me.

I drifted away when he began writing more about philosophy (with a hint of science fiction that he would later call science prediction).

It wasn’t until he began commenting on persuasion in 2015 that I returned to the fold—at least for a while. That led me to pick up his 2013 book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. I ignored the self-help portion, but the underlying theme of persuasion fascinated me. His later books flipped the script, putting practical persuasion strategies front and center (though the self-help never fully disappeared).

I enjoyed reading the blog, but didn’t follow Adams when he transitioned to video. I can read faster than I can watch. It’s the reason YouTube never captured my interest. By then, I continued reading his books, but the daily interaction was gone.

Then something dramatic happened. On one of his videos, Adams commented on a Rasmussen poll he felt was racist. To make his point, he swapped the language of the survey. As often happens, critics took the quote out of context, and Adams was immediately canceled.

You’d think that would have been the end of the story. And for many, it would have been.

But not Scott Adams. In the ultimate “reframe your brain” maneuver, Adams turned lemons into lemonade.

Hmm—maybe that’s an understatement. He turned lemons into 1959 Dom Pérignon Rosé.

Think of Obi-Wan Kenobi telling Darth Vader: “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”

Scott Adams came back stronger.

Unshackled by corporate constraints, he created a virtual community that included an A-List of powerful people. But his loyalties remained with the regular folk who had always been there.

And they were there when he died. He refused to give up his daily live show, even after a terminal cancer diagnosis. Death was the only thing that kept him from appearing.

While Coffee With Scott Adams was usually a monologue, the final week brought on many regulars—and a few notable celebrities.

It was a wake.

And he got to see it.