"Consultants have credibility because they are not dumb enough to work at your company"
About this Quote
Scott Adams lands this like a Dilbert punchline: a compliment with a knife in it, aimed at the little ecosystem of status and insecurity inside corporate life. The joke isn’t really about consultants; it’s about how companies outsource authority. A stranger with a slide deck can stroll in, rebrand common sense as “strategy,” and suddenly the room treats it as truth. Their credibility isn’t earned through insight so much as conferred by distance.
The line “not dumb enough to work at your company” weaponizes workplace paranoia. It reframes employment itself as a mark against you, implying that staying is evidence of diminished judgment. That sting is doing the work: it forces the listener to recognize a familiar hierarchy where insiders are discounted precisely because they’re insiders. If you’re on payroll, you’re compromised by office politics, sunk costs, and the assumption that you’ve already accepted the company’s mediocrity. If you’re external, you’re “objective,” which often just means expensive.
Context matters: Adams built a career satirizing 1990s-and-beyond management culture, where jargon, meetings, and “best practices” replace actual competence. The quote captures a late-capitalist irony: organizations crave disruption but only trust it when it arrives invoice-first. It’s cynicism with a practical observation underneath: credibility in many workplaces is less about being right than about being unentangled. Consultants don’t have to live with the consequences, so their confidence reads as expertise.
The line “not dumb enough to work at your company” weaponizes workplace paranoia. It reframes employment itself as a mark against you, implying that staying is evidence of diminished judgment. That sting is doing the work: it forces the listener to recognize a familiar hierarchy where insiders are discounted precisely because they’re insiders. If you’re on payroll, you’re compromised by office politics, sunk costs, and the assumption that you’ve already accepted the company’s mediocrity. If you’re external, you’re “objective,” which often just means expensive.
Context matters: Adams built a career satirizing 1990s-and-beyond management culture, where jargon, meetings, and “best practices” replace actual competence. The quote captures a late-capitalist irony: organizations crave disruption but only trust it when it arrives invoice-first. It’s cynicism with a practical observation underneath: credibility in many workplaces is less about being right than about being unentangled. Consultants don’t have to live with the consequences, so their confidence reads as expertise.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sarcastic |
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