The Mebert Hoax

I've always been fascinated by this ultimate example of Dilbert-ism in the real world, but the story due to age (it happened back in 1997) has been getting more difficult to find on the internet. So I've taken a minute to document the story here for posterity.

Here's the story as originall written in the San Jose Mercury News...

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, Oct. 8, 1997, 9:30 a.m.

Two hours later, management consultant Ray Mébert strides through the doors of Logitech International's headquarters in Fremont. 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 been 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, described Mébert 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 on aggressively finding new business opportunities, which is why the gifted Mébert 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.

Mébert (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,'' Mébert explains. ''I find that, otherwise, generic solutions might not fit as well.''

If the size of his entourage is a yardstick, Mébert 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.''

Mébert 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,'' Mébert 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,'' Mébert says. Zappacosta nods empathetically at such a difficult assignment. There follow serious nods--and a few chuckles--around the table.

Mébert continues with his credentials: He did a stint at Fortune Computer (one of the valley's legendary business failures), then founded Ray Mébert Associates. Apple immediately recruited him to strategize on its much ballyhooed--now beleaguered--handheld 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.'' Mébert, it seems, adheres strictly to the Dogbert doctrine.

If the Logitech execs were to look closely, they would notice a few signs that Mébert is not exactly who he says. 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 Mébert underwent two hours earlier at his home in Danville. It's also home to Mébert's alter ego, ''Dilbert'' creator Scott Adams.

And here's a couple of interviews Scott Adams gave about the incident shortly afterwards.

I got a call from Tia O'Brien [an independent reporter on assignment] for the San Jose Mercury News. She wanted to do a story that was going to be interesting and different. We brainstormed and came up with the idea that I'd put on a disguise, go to a corporation as a consultant, and see if I could fool people into thinking that I was a high-paid consultant when, in fact, I was just full of crap. Zappacosta thought it would be a fun idea. So we set up the scam. Tia acted as my assistant, and Pierluigi was the only one who was in on it in a room full of business executives at Logitech. For over one hour I took them through an exercise on how to rebuild their mission statement. I actually convinced them that the one they had was woefully inadequate. That's part of the humor of it - all mission statements are quite useless. So to tell them the one they had wasn't doing the job should have raised a red flag to begin with. But people in corporations are so used to two things: First, absurdity - so nothing seems too unusual. And second, there is not enough payoff to rock the boat. It was much easier for everyone to listen to what I had to say than to jump on me at the first sight of absurdity. Certainly everyone in the room had at least a moment where they said, "Man, I'm wasting my time!" But I made sure I always skated just below the level at which somebody would call my bluff and would think it was worth taking the chance of calling me a fraud. I had them thinking, "What if it just turns out that he's just eccentric but the best consultant in the world?"

See that picture to the left there, by the light switch? Where I'm peering from behind Dilbert? I have a big mustache and fake brown hair on? I was outfitted by a makeup artist and I went into Logitech as a famous consultant. I was brought in by the founder of the company, who was in on it, and he was in on the joke, and a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, a freelancer who was working there, set it up with me. They had their senior management there and I gave a whole presentation and reworked their mission statement with them. They thought I was there to give them a better mission statement. But, my stated goal was to give them the worst mission statement ever written, convince them it was good, and get them to agree to put it to music. I succeeded in all that. They agreed to put it to music and I didn't actually have them put it to music. But I got volunteers, and people volunteered. It was the worst mission statement ever written. Every person in that meeting was way above average in intelligence and not one bit more gullible than anybody else on Earth. Completely normal gullibility.