“OOH E OOH AH AH, TING TANG, WALLA WALLA BING BANG…”

8/31/09

Mary Schmich wrote a column in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune describing the plans of Lincoln Park Zoo to first eliminate the zoo’s docent program and then bring it back in a what some management types call a more “specialized, professionalized” form. People who have been working as docents, including the featured 78 year old Jack Gelfond, who has been working as a docent for 14 years, will have to reapply.

I don’t have strong feelings about the docent program at Lincoln Park Zoo. However, I do have strong feelings about the Zoo, one of the nation’s great zoos. Back when first I, then we, lived downtown, I or we would often walk along the lakefront to LPZ. (It is, after all, free, so the attraction of the zoo for the Quinns is obvious.) It’s a great place to spend time watching the animals, the people, and the spectacular surroundings of one of the nation’s great parks and neighborhoods. The docents always added to that experience with their knowledge of their charges and their enthusiasm for their volunteer jobs. My wife considered becoming a docent, but then we moved away, started having babies…you know the story. It seems to me that the docents will be missed, but perhaps the new program will result in new, improved docents. One suspects, though, that the results of the management types’ tinkering with the docent program will be about the same as the result of Coca-Cola’s managements’ tinkering with the old formula, but, being an expert on neither the operations of zoos or the finer points of sugar water, I just don’t know enough to make that judgment.

What I do know, though, is that, according to Ms. Schmich’s report, someone wrote the following drivel in a zoo document:

“…the antiquated volunteer utilization model…does not enhance the zoo’s strategic initiatives and often does not set up the volunteers for success.”

Hmm…

Someone was actually paid to write such codswallop, in all likelihood some consultant type who spent his or her college or grad school years in some management program learning the latest techniques in substituting gormless gobbledygook for actual management, or actual work.

Is it a mere coincidence that the onslaught of this corporate equivalent the Tower of Babel became popular at roughly the same time our large corporations became bureaucratized and anesthetized and our economy began its long descent into economic hell? Imagine what might have happened had the talent that went toward devising such mumbo-jumbo, and making the decision to hire people to produce such foppish flim-flam, went toward, say, figuring out how to effectively compete with cheap labor in the developing world, actually analyzing the securities the financial types stuffed in America’s (now) collective portfolio, or avoiding ignominious bankruptcy? Perhaps we might have a viable economy today. But maybe not. Maybe the production of such pointless pap in the “mission statements” and annual reports of the bulbous, billowing bureaucracies that used to be our great corporations kept their bumbling managements distracted, thus preventing even more serious damage from those who think uttering such tripe as “antiquated utilization model” and “enhancing strategic initiatives” constitutes management.