Locke To State Managers: No ‘Dilbert Bosses’ Allowed Government Should Improve Quality Without Meaningless Gobbledygook

Gov. Gary Locke said Wednesday he will tolerate no managers in state government like Dilbert’s boss.

Instead, he told hundreds of his mid-level managers, he wants each of their agencies to “develop and implement a program to improve the quality, efficiency and effectiveness of public services it provides through quality improvement, business process redesign, employee involvement and other quality improvement techniques.”

And that’s not all.

Indeed, the first-term Democrat declared, “to signal the dawn of a new day in state government, I will sign a Quality Improvement Executive Order.” He did so amid loud applause from an assembly of about 900 middle-managers.

Locke drew several rounds of applause during and after his speech, in which he exhorted state managers to do a good job and serve the public even as they suffer public disdain and “one-sided” and “dumb media stories” about government waste and ineptitude.

“Every state agency should be a learning organization, an organization that values flexibility and individual initiative, that rewards taking risks, that learns from experience. And every state agency should be led both from the bottom up and the top down,” Locke told the crowd, assembled in a rented downtown hall at a cost of $530.

“We have no room in state government for managers who bear any resemblance to Dilbert’s boss,” Locke, the former King County Executive, said.

He was referring to the dim, incompetent boss in Scott Adams’ popular cartoon strip “Dilbert,” who is forever using gobbledygook to instruct his employees to perform meaningless tasks.

But some of the managers who rose to question Locke after his speech indicated they might be a bit mystified by some of their chief executive’s words.

One woman asked him his “personal definition” of a “learning organization,” referring to Locke’s statement in his speech that “every state agency should be a learning organization.”

Basically, Locke said, a “learning organization” is one in which bosses and workers alike “feel free to admit that they’ve done some things wrong,” and learn from those mistakes, rather than find a scapegoat to blame.

Another manager rose to suggest that the public doesn’t hear enough about the good things state government does, but instead is bombarded with media coverage of less important subjects, such as financing for a new Seahawks stadium.