Parking September 2010 - 11

the Sapiens reason out that perhaps the very old and the very young should go to pick mushrooms while the strongest members go hunt mastodon. One tribe member notes that mastodons sure don’t like to have sticks waved at them; it scares them. Another says the whole herd runs away as one if you try to get too close. Another whimsically wishes the mastodon herd would just trip and fall over that cliff at the end of the valley. Within moments the tribe has devised a clever plan to stampede the mastodons off the cliff, thereby ensuring a meat supply to last the winter and avoiding the somewhat risky strategy of trying to kill mastodons with sticks like those dopey Neanderthals do. Voilà: ideas having sex. While Neanderthals appear to have lived in solitary groups, humans leveraged sophisticated divisions of labor into mercantile systems. Excess mushrooms from one tribe were exchanged for mastodon jerky from another tribe. Along the way, better ways for growing mushrooms and hunting mastodons were traded and taken home. More and better division of labor results in a concomitant leap in progress, such that today, who among us can individually “manufacture” a Blackberry, or a multispace meter for that matter? We have no clue, but we don’t “need” to know. Specialists in those fields manufacture Blackberrys and multispace meters while we do whatever it is that we do. Ridley makes a good point about technology here too. Few, if any, technologies are truly new. They are recombined endlessly into new and better forms; progress is really just the latest mash-up. His favorite: a conversation between a gastroenterologist and a missile designer resulted in the “camera pill,” an inventive way for doctors to see what’s going on inside someone’s digestive tract. (Ahhh… you need to eat more mushrooms, and you really should cut back on the mastodon.) So what does evolution, ideas having sex, division of labor, collaboration, progress, and technology mashups have to do with P&T?

First of all, as the old saying goes, “Dance with the one who brung ya.” Our species triumphed because we are a mercantilistic tribe of idea-sharers. It’s in our DNA. We are at our best when we observe and learn from others, continually improve process and result quality, and network with others. True progress occurs as we identify the individual skill sets of our organizational “tribe,” allocate proper division of labor to allow individuals to flourish and create, confab with others doing the same thing, and then market the end product. For us, this also means carefully listening to our customers, clients and employees. Customers and clients are arguably the only ones who can truly tell us what we should be selling them. Our employees can tell us how to do that better. Allowing customers to network with customers and employees with employees leverages the individual’s idea power into collective intelligence and organizational progress. So while management supplies the “vision” of heaps of yummy mushrooms and mastodon steaks, participants in that transaction offer the incremental tweaks to bring the vision to reality. Grog the Neanderthal never learned anything new with his disengaged, dismissive, top-down management style. Grog had only a vague idea about the desired result, but failed to collaborate and communicate with others about the process necessary to produce that result. Many of us have had someone like Grog as a boss in the past or worked for GrogCo. Unfortunately for Grog, he’s become a fossil, and, in this day and age, so might bosses and organizations like him. Remember, it’s progress… or extinction. 
Charles R. “Charlie” Munn III, CAPP CPP is a former commer, , cial parking executive and operations consultant. He is now a customer service management consultant and freelance writer. Contact him at cmunn3@aol.com.

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Parking September 2010

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