Son, I Already Don’t Farm Half As Good As I Know How

….  It may be the hot topic of the moment but for Michael Ray, the outgoing president of Bermuda Taxi Association (BTA), the issue of GPS is a dead one.

He once led the Island’s cabbies in revolt against Tourism and Transport Minister Ewart Brown’s proposals for the satellite navigation system. But now his message to taxi drivers is: “It’s a done deal. Get past it.”…  read full article from the Bermuda Royal Gazette here:

Seems there was this young ag school grad student who had the job of selling an expensive technical book on farming to the local farmers in some little backwater place or another.  The eager young man sort of trapped a crusty old farmer in the corner of two fences one day so that the old boy had to listen to a long spiel explaining to him how much the book would benefit him and why he ought to buy it.  Finally the eager young salesman  paused for breath and popped the magic question … “Sir, now that I’ve explained all the benefits, would you care to buy the book?

The wizened old farmer responded with a terse “Nope.”

Undeterred the eager ag ‘ techno geek” pressed on, asking, “Sir I’ve explained and you’ve agreed that the information in this book will probably increase your efficiency and even improve your profits.  Whatever is your reason for not wanting to take advantage of our offer”?

The old boy looked down, spat between his boots, raised his head and said, “Sonny, I already don’t farm half as good as I know how.”

The story I linked to here is fairly long but it’s well-written and I urge you to read it if you’re interested in GPS or if you now manage, or think you’ll ever need to manage people.  It’s a pretty good lesson in how well-meaning government folks, industry managers and rank and file employees and entrepreneurs can all work at a project with a good heart, yet make it all come out terribly wrong.  It would make a great case study for Harvard or the Wharton School of Business or for one of my old bosses who told me about his MBA at least 15 times a day … on a good day.

I’ve written a number of time before here about the forced GPS taxi issues in Bermuda and in Philadelphia.  See here, here, here and here for a few samples.  I’m really at a loss on these two quagmires that people have dug themselves into.

Although I am neither a driver nor a taxi business owner I have been a government official and then a business owner for many years.  I understand the basics of how you can make money with a cab, and certainly know something about how bad work has to be before a taxi owner/operator is going to toss it away.

The article from Bermuda explains quite a bit about some of the personalities, but certainly doesn’t account for the total waste of having a system on board that has been proven to make more money yet arbitrarily refusing to use it.

I can tell you this from my long experience in these projects as well.  It is not the technical implementation that will pose your biggest challenge.  Nor is it the financing or the legal issues.  It’s how you present the project to the folks who will have to live with it, the persons’ whose livelihood you are messing with.

If you’re thinking about a GPS project and you don’t want to be front page news and “blog-fodder’., better consider the people first.  Otherwise they are going to keep on farming only half as good as they know how.