MISSION STATEMENT My goal is to see if a group of executives will allow somebody who has very few credentials, except for good hair, to come into their meeting and get them to write a mission statement which is so impossibly complicated that it has no real content. Scott Adams, 9:30 a.m., Oct. 8, 1997 Two hours later, management consultant Ray Mebert strides through the doors of Logitech International's headquarters in Fremont, Calif. Few employees give a second glance at the short, mustached man in a gray suit as he weaves through a maze of cubicles to a conference room in which almost a dozen senior executives have assembled. In a memo distributed to a selected group of Logitech's vice presidents and senior managers, Pierluigi Zappacosta, the company's co-founder and vice chairman, had described Mebert as a man with "special talents as a facilitator" and "a very original thinker" who has collaborated with big-name consultants. It's not as if Logitech, the world's largest manufacturer of computer mice and related devices, is in a slump. In Silicon Valley, the 3,000-employee company is considered a strong innovator. But in this fast-paced industry, survival depends in large part upon aggressively finding new business opportunities, which is why the gifted Mebert has been summoned. His charge, in the words of Zappacosta's memo, is to help "crisply define the goals" of the New Ventures Group. Translation: It's time for that most dreaded of corporate exercises, rewriting the mission statement. Mebert (the French pronunciation, please!) carries nothing but a thin manila folder with documents summarizing Logitech's business goals which he has studiously avoided reading. "I try not to become too familiar with the companies I'm consulting for," Mebert explains. "I find that, otherwise, generic solutions might not fit as well." If the size of his entourage is a yardstick, Mebert clearly is a success. Does Michael Porter, the celebrated authority on competitive business strategy, arrive with a photographer, a videotaping crew and a personal assistant named Sheena Diamond? Noting all the electronic gear, one exec is heard to mutter, "Wow, he's got to be expensive." Mebert quickly confirms his stature in the management consulting universe. "I did the Harvard MBA thing, and then I went to Procter & Gamble where I worked on the Taste Bright Project," Mebert says. Taste Bright, he explains, was a top-secret effort his team worked on for years, to boost soap sales by cashing in on not only the olfactory but also the gustatory sense. "There actually are some people who admitted in focus groups that they would sometimes taste soap. We found that to get repeat business it was necessary to actually improve the smell as well as the taste of the soap," Mebert says. Zappacosta nods empathetically at such a difficult assignment. There follow serious nods and a few chuckles around the table. Mebert continues with his credentials: He did a stint at Fortune Computer (one of the Silicon Valley's legendary business failures), then founded Ray Mebert Associates. Apple immediately recruited him to strategize on its much-ballyhooed now beleaguered hand-held computer, the Newton. These less-than-proud consulting experiences do not raise an eyebrow. Then again, as any loyal reader of "Dilbert" can tell you, consultants play by their own rules. To quote that management guru Dogbert: "Consultants don't need much experience in an industry in order to be experts. They learn quickly. If your 26-year-old consultant drives past the Egghead software outlet on the way to an assignment, that would qualify as experience in the software industry." Mebert, it seems, adheres strictly to the Dogbert doctrine. If the Logitech execs were to look closely, they would notice a few signs that Mebert is not exactly who he says he is. Strands of sandy blond hair peek from under his thick brown locks. His mustache is a little too symmetrical. Not bad, though, given the hasty transformation Mebert underwent two hours earlier at his home in Danville, Calif. It's also home to Mebert's alter ego, "Dilbert" creator Scott Adams. "Does it look real?" Adams anxiously asks as a makeup artist places a brown wig on his head. His entourage -- the magazine photographer, a video crew and me -- reassures Adams that his new hair is passably real if, uh, a bit like a lounge lizard's. This day is a watershed in Adams' career. Henceforth, he will no longer be just the internationally celebrated lampooner of corporate America. He'll be the worst-prepared, longest-winded, most inept consultant to set foot in a temple of capitalism. In other words, when he walks into the Logitech conference room, he'll bring the "Dilbert" strip to life, trying his hand at the doublespeak dished up by Dogbert, whose fabled nose is always sniffing out the next buzzword or employee-demeaning fad. Our elaborate ruse grew out of my story assignment. I wanted to see what would happen if Adams were turned loose in the corporate arena he so loves to ridicule. The idea is not so far-fetched. He has turned down several offers from company presidents who wanted to hire him anonymously so he could observe office protocol and meetings. "What if I was a management consultant?" Adams suggested to me. "I could lead a bunch of executives in writing a mission statement so impossibly complicated that it has no real content whatsoever." If no one guesses that he's a fraud, Adams will claim victory more proof of the inanities heaped on the masses of white-collar workers who herald Dilbert and his gang as their heroes. One problem: What company would allow us to subject managers to Adams' experiment? I started asking around the valley for a top executive with a sense of humor whose company was a strong performer and didn't take its corporate culture too seriously. "That would be Pierluigi at Logitech," one source instantly replied. Minutes later, I was patched through to Zappacosta's car phone. "Sure, it sounds very interesting. Why not?" he said, laughing. I liked this guy. Two weeks later, with the clock ticking down to our noon meeting, Adams sits on a stool in the comfortable home office complete with pool table where he draws Dilbert each morning. His pressed gray suit is protected by the makeup artist's apron. As Robin Church affixes a mustache with spirit gum, Adams, 40, offers his theory of success: "The key to credibility in the business world is being tall, having an Ivy League education and having good hair. I'm halfway home now on the good hair thing," he says, giving his new brown thatch an appreciative pat.

For our adventure, he intends to bestow upon Ray Mebert a Harvard MBA, only a tad more prestigious than his own Berkeley MBA. As for being tall, well, even shoe lifts won't do much for a guy who's 5-foot-8. I'll try to have good posture," he says with a sigh. Adams nurtured his cynical wit about bosses during his eight-year stint inside cubicle 4S700R at Pacific Bell. Under the glare of fluorescent lights at boring meetings, Adams incubated the Dilbert Principle, which became the basis of a bestseller. It states: "The most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage management." This anti-boss comic crusade has made Dilbert a spokesperson for cubicle prisoners worldwide (the strip is carried by 1,700 newspapers in 51 countries) and it has made Adams a "Dilbert" mogul. He has had three books on The New York Times bestseller list. There are licensing rights to mugs, Dilbert character dolls, a Dilbert Web site, a Dilbert newsletter, even Dilbert-inspired ads for Office Depot. Adams oversees it all with no staff. If he were to hire just one employee, Adams believes, he'd be descending what he refers to as the "slippery slope" into the management he loves to satirize. Just four years ago, Dilbert's fate was uncertain. Only about 100 newspapers had picked up the strip about the geeky engineer -- a strange-looking guy with no mouth, opaque glasses and a head like the top of a bunch of celery. About 80 percent of the cartoon was generic humor, only about 20 percent about the idiosyncrasies or idiocies of corporate life. All that changed when Adams implanted his e-mail address (scottadams@aol.com) in the strip, a first for a cartoonist. He was inundated with e-mail from fans who clamored for more strips ridiculing incompetent bosses and nitwit management practices. Adams realized he'd hit a nerve. He refocused "Dilbert" and began skewering sacred business cows like downsizing all the rage in 1993. In one strip, a manager announces he'll use humor to ease mounting tensions over workforce reductions: "Knock, knock," says the manager. "Who's there?" replies the unsuspecting worker. The manager grins. "Not you anymore." It's been two years since Adams left his $70,000-a-year day job as a middle manager at Packard Bell to concentrate on "Dilbert." He's traded in his two-bedroom townhouse for a stately Tudor-style home he shares with his girlfriend, Pam Okasaki. The second-floor office is filled with life-size Dilbert cardboard cutouts and other Dilbert memorabilia. On a table is the state-of-the-art video conferencing equipment that allows Adams to do virtual book tours without leaving home. There is a radio-quality telephone line for the never-ending media interviews. "I don't really need people much," he says. Oddly, his orderly world inside the gated community where every green lawn and bush is manicured, every fallen leaf instantly blown away, strikes me as, well, one giant cubicle. Adams is controlling his life as tightly as corporate America once controlled him. Adams gets about 350 e-mails a day from "Dilbert" loyalists whose tales of cubicle hell often inspire his strips. He's in demand as a speaker for corporate audiences at $20,000 to $30,000 a pop. His answering machine warns that he's booked for speaking engagements until the end of 1998. But he's agreed to break his tight schedule and return to the trenches of capitalism for this adventure in consulting. "Mission statements have gotten kind of a bad rap lately," Mebert tells the Logitech group. The assembled executives nine men and two women represent the company's major departments. Zappacosta has asked them to work with Mebert to craft a mission statement for the New Ventures Group, which he heads. Dutifully, they hold pens over notepads, ready to capture Mebert's utterances. Like the following: "If any of you recently read the Yankovitch and Meyer study about mission statements comparing companies that have mission statements with those that don't have them, it wasn't enough to just have a mission statement, but rather the companies that had high awareness among the employees about what the mission statement was, tended to have higher profits year after year." Got that? Did anyone ever hear of the consulting firm Yankovitch and Meyer? Unlikely. It doesn't exist. But not a hand is raised, so he continues with a Mebert trademark: The Analogy. A mission statement's mysterious role in generating higher profits is, he says, like a great soup recipe from your neighbor. "You wouldn't say, 'Well, this is a great soup, but I could take the broccoli out or take a little pepper out and it would still be great soup.' You never know exactly which part of the soup is the part that kind of made it work. In fact, it's that it all worked together that really makes it kind of work at all. So it is with mission statements." I am in the back of the room -- Mebert's assistant, alias Sheena Diamond. Now I nearly choke on my cheese and pesto sandwich, a lunch catered in honor of Mebert. Surely the soup analogy will prompt someone to wonder if this is a joke. Margaret Wynne, vice president of business development, looks impatient. A few others fidget. But Zappacosta nods appreciatively and no one dares challenge the wisdom of Yankovitch and Meyer or the merits of broccoli soup. As long as the boss is enraptured, the gang follows along. Mebert moves to the easel. "Let me show you the cognitive framework that I'd like to use. It's what I call a mission triad." He draws three interlocking circles and glances at his artwork, "I don't draw very good circles," he apologizes. In each circle he writes a word: Authority. Linguistics. Message. Pointing authoritatively to the tiny area where the circles overlap, Mbert announces, "This is the Buy-In Zone." Only when authority, linguistics and message are working harmoniously will employees "buy in" to the profit-boosting mission statement. And employees must "buy in to the vision," Mebert says, "or else the thing can't work." A couple of people jot down notes. Jack Lahorsky, senior program manager for control devices, studies the triad with a stern look -- really, a glare. Will he put Mebert on the spot by asking the obvious: What's the basis for this official-looking triangulation of success? Mebert disregards any hostile body language and points with a flourish to "Authority." "This is the reason for having the people in this room, the people who have credibility with the people who are actually going to be doing the day-to-day work." And, he explains, it's also the reason for the cameras. He'll produce a "video montage" of the mission statement process that will be a "visual and physical record to show who is in the room."

He jabs at the next circle: "Linguistics." Mebert looks perturbed. "Picking the wrong words is a mistake a lot of companies have made." Finally, "Message." "You have to have the right message!" Mebert admonishes. How many words does it take to screw up a sentence? It's about 25 minutes into the hour, time to begin crafting the mission statement. For the uninitiated, this generally is a summation of a company's business goals. Mebert whips out from the manila folder a thin document, the mission statement that Logitech New Ventures Group wrote just six months ago. Mebert reads: "The New Ventures mission is to provide Logitech with profitable growth and related new business areas." He doesn't even try to hide his disdain. "Does that seem vague enough for you?" he challenges. Worried looks flicker across a few faces -- several people in this room helped write those words. Right on page 36 of "Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook" (Harperbusiness, 1996) a successful mission statement is defined as "a long awkward sentence that demonstrates management's inability to think clearly. All good companies have one." So how did Logitech produce such a grievously uncomplicated statement? "One of the reasons is that it's typical of companies to have a group writing exercise," Mebert says. "I want to spare you from that." Instead, he will be "concentrating on the linguistics part of the exercise." This involves a kind of word-association drill. Mebert will prompt the executives to throw out "specific words" that "describe where you are and where you want to be." Barry Zwarenstein, senior vice president and chief financial officer, shoots up his hand to protest. "I think we've got a pretty good statement. It's clear and focused." I glance around the table for other detractors: Will Zwarenstein start a mutiny? All eyes are on Mebert, who looks down at the questioner. "If you came into work today and said, 'My mission statement is to have profitable growth in related new business areas,' would it make you do something differently that you wouldn't have done that day? Does it drive any action? That's really the task!" Zwarenstein crosses his arms defiantly, but shuts up. In the best Dogbert tradition, Mebert ignores the difficult CFO. When it comes to employee input, Dogbert advises paying no attention to "any pesky assumptions that don't support the [consultants'] predetermined recommendations." ("The Dilbert Principle," Harperbusiness, 1996, page 152.) The next 30 minutes are spent playing what I'll call "Name That Mission Word." Mebert's felt-tip marker is poised for action at the easel. Dilbert die-hards would recognize this as a variation of "buzzword bingo," the game played by Dilbert characters every time someone says a word like "proactive" in a meeting. "Active," calls out Michael Doyle, senior manager for customer support, who has a ponytail and wears a faded Logitech T-shirt. "Not waiting for somebody to tell you what to do." Mebert looks concerned. A two-syllable word when three syllables are available? "So really a pro-active kind of thing," he says, writing "Proactive" as the first word on the list. "Education," someone else offers. "Education, hmmm," Mebert ponders. "Seems like there's a better word for that. There's really an osmosis kind of thing here." He scribbles "Education-Osmosis" on the easel. "Is it a formal process with classes?" he asks, then adds "Formal" next to "Osmosis." "Relationship is a big one," says Jack Zahorsky, less standoffish now. Mebert nods. Four syllables; not bad, but a little mundane. One guy suggests they're getting too specific. "If you step back and look at the [New Ventures] group as helping break down paradigms and fertilize the ground, the rest of us could focus on areas that are ours in new ways." Mebert is writing madly: "Breaking Paradigms," "Fertilizing." This guy hit the Mission Word Jackpot and he's still talking, now about new ways of looking at customers. Mebert rips off a new sheet and quickly adds his own inspiration: "Consumerization process." Zappacosta signals his approval with another nod and Mebert expounds on this weighty word that Webster's has somehow overlooked. "So you've got a shift as well as fairly bifurcated focus shifting and changing your focus on a fairly agile basis," he says, practically swaying to the rhythm of his words. He pauses, then asks, "Does it seem like your job has changed every day? Do you feel you have to be agile at all?" Murmurs of agreement. The major workplace challenge, the group agrees, is being agile enough to survive in the dizzying pace of today's corporate world. Mebert suggests that there are two strategies for achieving corporate agility. And what better way to illustrate them than with the Two Presidents Analogy? "One is Ronald Reagan. 'These are my principles' and kind of marching straight ahead." And then, "There's the fairly agile Bill Clinton method, which is, you see what the market forces are and you adjust accordingly." Urs Boesiger, director of engineering for the scanner division, looks perplexed. "I was coming into this with the assumption that the group would be focused entirely on products. Now it seems that there's a much bigger scope." Suddenly, the meeting is at another dangerous junction. A participant is trying to keep the mission statement discussion tightly focused. That, of course, violates the Dogbert precept, which mandates rambling, disconnected intercourse. If Dogbert were here, he probably would yell and throw the guy out the window. How will Mebert avoid a meeting meltdown? Mebert: "So if it's not products, what is it?" Boesiger: "For me, it's products." Mebert: "But somebody else has another view, is that what you are saying? What is the alternative to product?" Someone else: "What he's talking about is service, support. . ." Boesiger looks even more confused, but Mebert sighs with relief. Thanks to his artful facilitating, no one in the room is sure if they're talking about products or service or "Vision Alignment," another term added to the list that now sprawls over four easel pages taped to the wall. Before we left his house that morning, I asked Adams where he developed his warped sense of humor. He smiled. "It's a combination of maybe abduction by aliens when I was young, through a head injury, and then the sensory deprivation of the cubicle."

A few days later, I called his parents to confirm his story. "How did he end up this way?" Virginia Adams says, "Well, I guess because he's a product of my husband and me. I see things a little askew and Paul has a great sense of humor." Just how askew? Well, Virginia gave birth to her daughter under hypnosis. "That's the only way a woman should give birth. No pain!" she advises me. (For the record, Scott Adams is a trained hypnotist.) And there was the time Virginia took little Scott and his brother and sister to the movie "Romeo and Juliet." Virginia chuckles at the memory. "Romeo didn't leave her one drop of poison. That just cracked me up. I was laughing so hard that everyone in the theater got mad at me." Virginia and Paul Adams still live in Windham, N.Y., population 3,500, a ski resort community in the Catskills where they raised their three kids. Their home looks out onto a ski run. "On a clear day, you can hear the bones breaking," says Paul, a retired postal worker. Scott hated the cold so much that after getting trapped in his car in a snowstorm in 1979, he bought a plane ticket to California. He still hasn't returned to Windham. Were they shocked to see the stuff that poured out of Scott once he started drawing Dilbert? Virginia: "No. The way he looks at things seems perfectly normal, at least to us." When their son was 11, he was rejected by the mail-order Famous Artists School. To be famous, he was told, you must be at least 12. When Adams was 29, he tried selling his cartoons and amassed a pile of rejection letters. But he was prodded to keep trying by a cartoonist who saw promise in his work, and finally won a contract with United Media in 1988. Both parents feel they helped alert Adams to the horror of cubicle life. One Saturday, Adams got a Packard Bell pass so he could take them on a tour of his work space. Virginia: "I just stood there absolutely appalled and said, 'My Gawd, you work eight hours a day here?' But we were quite taken by the robot that delivers the mail." Paul sums up his observations with -- of course! -- his Veal Analogy. "Ever see how calves are raised in little plastic domes about 3 feet tall and across with a little porthole to look out of? After a certain size, they're slaughtered. That's what spending your whole life in a cubicle looks like to me." It's about 40 minutes into the hour. Mbert has collected 25 terms for building the mission statement. He explains the next step: "Essentializing is the key to the good mission statement. But you want to essentialize in a way in which when you're done, you've got something that will cause action." Translation: They must cross out the less important terms. They agree to strike "Commitment," "Fertilizing" and "Dedicated Resources." Someone says that "Return on Investment" is so self-evident that it doesn't need to be included. A vigorous debate ensues. Finally, Mebert steps in. "How many of you are for getting rid of 'investment' or the reference to profitability in this?" CFO Zwarenstein tenses up. "Let's not kid ourselves, if we don't have a very solid return on investments . . . it's a slippery slope." Will Mebert defy the CFO? All eyes are on the consultant. "So we have a strong voice for keeping that in there," he sniffs as he rips off the easel page and readies a fresh sheet. Zwarenstein relaxes in his chair. With only three terms crossed off, Mbert waves the felt-tip marker and begins, "The New Ventures Mission is. . ." Now it's up to the group to complete the sentence. Mebert looks smug; what better way to spark competition than to challenge the executives to pick only "the best" phrases for this document? Everyone wants his or her word to make the final cut. One person jockeys for "Growth," another for "Mission Inclusive," a third for "Emerging Markets." Mebert melds the winners: "The New Ventures Mission is to scout profitable growth opportunities in emerging, mission-inclusive markets, view new ways of looking at things. . ." Mebert looks up from his scrawl. "Is it worth saying that you're limiting your focus to things that are a new paradigm?" (Is it worth noting that Mbert is adding a term, not paring down the list?) "Let's throw that in there and see," says Michael Doyle. Mebert scratches out "view new ways of looking at things" and replaces it with "explore new paradigms." Mebert looks satisfied with the group's progress. But, he asks, should emerging markets be just Internal or External? A spirited discussion follows. Mebert settles the matter by inserting both words into the sentence, as well as "Relationships" and "Communicate the Findings." That's not enough for Jack Zahorsky. "Communicate and Evangelize," he says. Mebert adds another word. Zahorsky's still tinkering. "It should almost be like a funnel or filter." When the felt-tip marker finally rests, the sentence looks cancerous. Let's backtrack for a second. This exercise was to improve the "vague" mission statement that Mebert holds in such disdain: "The New Ventures mission is to provide Logitech with profitable growth and related new business areas." Now, after an hour, Mebert has wrought: "The New Ventures mission is to scout profitable growth opportunities in relationships, both internally and externally, in emerging, mission inclusive markets, and explore new paradigms and then filter and communicate and evangelize the findings." Zappacosta nods exuberantly. His executive team looks satisfied. But Mebert is not finished. Remember the Buy-In Zone? A mission statement is worthless unless it's communicated to and accepted by employees. "Anybody play an instrument or do any composing?" Mebert asks. Zahorsky: "I play the flute, the sax and the keyboard." Mebert: "Because what I've found is that some companies have created, like, a division song around the mission statement." Other than a few strange looks and smiles, people seem game. At least nobody's protesting aloud. "It sounds funny," Mebert says, "but companies who have done this, if they ask somebody what their mission statement is, you get a 90 percent recognition, like the McDonald's jingle thing." Pause. "What do you think of trying to put it to music?" Several people chuckle. Doyle, an avid participant throughout, offers his support. "Yeah, the songs on Saturday morning, it helps you remember." Can it be? Are they really going to turn New Paradigm into a melody?