Do you recognise anyone here by any chance?

There is another fictional management expert, along the lines of Dilbert, called Max Elmore who can be found in the writings of Dale Dauten. Max has these truths about business:

On Retail Clerks: You could see it in the way she carried herself: she was the kind of employee always looking for nothing to do.

On the Life of an Employee: Remember your math teacher saying, "Name any number and I can name one bigger"? Some schlump would fall for it and say, "A zillion" and the teacher would respond smugly, "A zillion and one." It's like that with jobs -- name a terrible job and I can name one worse. You say, "A guy who cleans up after autopsies in the morning and empties septic tanks in the afternoon." I say, "His assistant."

On Warning Labels: It is, of course, impossible to warn boneheaded consumers of every conceivable blunder. As the saying goes, "Genius has its limits, but there's no end to stupidity." Even when reasonable people exercise all due caution, life is full of dangers. If God could be sued, we'd have no mountains.

On Downsizing: The company calls it "downsizing" or "rightsizing." What about some other euphemisms: Retroactive Hiring Freeze, Resume Revision Days, Amway Opportunity Time, and Corporation Lite.

On Meetings: You take a dozen lively, intelligent people, put them in a conference room, then leap out of the way of falling IQ's. Successful managers hide their "meeting senility" and appear interested even while napping. What begins as a Meeting of the Minds soon becomes a Meeting of the Thoughtful Expressions.

On Presentations: Generations of presenters have adopted the K.I.S.S principle -- Keep It Simple Stupid. This is the K.I.S.S. of D.E.A.T.H. for audience concentration, however. The speaker, sensing inattention, simplifies still more. This downward spiral ends in the Lucidity Paradox: the speaker's points eventually become so clear they disappear.

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