Dave Barry: Claw Your Way To The Top

(a) You promote the black woman, on the theory that it will help compensate for past injustices.

(b) You promote the white woman, on the theory that if you promote the black woman, people will say it was just because she’s black.

(c) You flip a coin.

HOW TO SCORE

Give yourself one point for each close friend you have in the Personnel Department.

When we look around us at the modern world, we see businesses everywhere, unless of course we happen to be, for example, in the bathroom. But even there, we see EVIDENCE of a thriving industrial economy, such as the Ty-D-Bowl automatic commode freshener. Sitting there and thinking about it, you have to marvel at the incredible creativity and diversity of the business world. Where did all of this come from? How did the human race get from the point of being primitive and stupid to the point where it could automatically, without lifting a finger, turn its toilet water blue? Let’s see if we can answer some of these questions. My guess is we can’t.

Many, many years ago, there was no business on Earth. This is because the Earth was primarily molten lava, which is not a good economic climate. Office furniture would melt in a matter of seconds.

Then the Earth started to cool, and tiny one-celled animals—the amigo, the paramedic, the rotarian—began to form. Over the course of several million years, these animals learned to join together to form primitive corporations, called “jellyfish,” which were capable of only the most basic business activities, such as emitting waste and eating lunch. By today’s standards, these corporations were very unsophisticated: if, for example, you mentioned the phrase “Dow Jones Industrial Average” to them, they would have no idea what you were talking about. They would probably sting you.

Nobody can really say for sure, because the Ice Age destroyed all their records. But paleontologists now believe that, yes, dinosaurs probably did have businesses. Not the Brontosaurus, of course. That would be ridiculous. How would he hold his briefcase?

But the Tyrannosaurus Rex has those funny little arms, which would have been perfect. Paleontologists think he was probably in Sales.

When primitive humans first came along, they did not engage in business as we now think of it. They engaged in squatting around in caves naked. This went on for, I would say, roughly two or three million years, when all of a sudden a primitive person, named Oog, came up with an idea. “Why not,” he said, “pile thousands of humongous stones on top of each other in the desert to form great big geometric shapes?” Well, everybody thought this was an absolutely terrific idea, and soon they were hard at work. It wasn’t until several thousand years later that they realized they had been suckered into a classic “pyramid” scheme, and of course by that time, Oog was in the Bahamas.

Business during the Middle Ages was slow. The main job opportunity available was serf, which involved whacking at the soil with a stick. It was not the kind of work where you had a lot of room for advancement. The best a serf could hope for, if he was really good at it, was that he would be rewarded by not having one of his arms sliced off by a passing knight.

If you wanted to be a knight you had to know somebody, and it really wasn’t that much better than being a serf. You were always being sent off to try to get the Holy Land back from the Turks. This was no fun at all, because of course the Holy Land is very sunny, meaning your armor would get hot enough to fry an egg on. In fact the Turks, who dressed in light, casual, 100

percent cotton garments, would often do this. They’d sneak up behind a knight and crack an egg on his armor, then race away, laughing in Turkish, before he could turn around. So as you can imagine, knights would come back in a pretty bad mood, and often would have to slice off several serf arms before they even wanted to talk about it.

So the bottom line is that the Middle Ages were hardly the kind of ages where anybody wanted to make any long-term business commitments. All the really smart investors were waiting for the Renaissance.

The Renaissance was caused by Leonardo da Vinci, who drew the first primitive sketches of what would eventually become the helicopter. Of course, nobody really understood the significance of this at the time. But people did realize that, whatever this new invention was, it was going to require a tremendous amount of insurance. Thus a major business was born.

This was followed by trade with the Orient. The way this worked was, Europeans would gather up some gold, and they would tromp across Asia to the Orient, where they would trade their gold for spices. They didn’t really want spices, you understand, but the Orientals claimed that spice was all they had, and the Europeans, having tromped all that way, wanted to take home something.

After some years of this, the Europeans were starting to run out of gold. Also their food was so heavily spiced that it glowed in the dark. They probably would have all died of heartburn if Columbus had not discovered the New World.

Every schoolchild is familiar with the story of how Columbus set off in three tiny ships (the Pinto, the Cordoba, and the Coupe de Ville), and right away his crew started getting very nauseous and asking why for God’s sake he had decided on three tiny ships instead of one medium ship. Nevertheless Columbus pressed on, ignoring popular fears that he would sail off the edge of the Earth, and finally he and his hardy band made it to the New World, except for the Pinto, which mysteriously exploded, and the Cordoba, which due to a navigational error actually did sail off the edge of the Earth.

The New World had an extremely good business climate. For one thing, there was plenty of land, and nobody owned it, unless you counted the people who had been living there for several thousand years. For another thing, it had an abundance of the two crucial factors you need for economic development: Water Power, in the form of rivers, and Raw Materials, in the form of ore. So soon millions of Europeans flocked over to the New World to make their fortunes. They stood around all day, sunup to sundown, throwing handfuls of ore into the rivers and waiting for economic development to take place. They would have starved to death if a friendly Indian named Squanto (which is Indian for “Native American”) hadn’t come along and shown them how to plant corn. “You put the seeds in the ground,” explained Squanto. He couldn’t believe what kind of morons he was dealing with.

Soon the corn came up, and the Europeans decided to celebrate by inviting all the Indians over for a big Thanksgiving dinner, then sending them off to live on reservations in North Dakota.

At the beginning of the modern corporate era, many businesses actually made things. Typically, they’d get hold of a Raw Material, which they’d smelt and pour into a mold, where it would cool and form a product, which they’d sell for a profit, which the owner would use to buy his family a nice house on Long Island.

The problem was that when the owner died, the family members were darned if they’d come in off Long Island and engage in anything as filthy as smelting, so they’d hire a professional manager to run the business. Often, however, the professional manager was a graduate of Harvard Business School, and consequently he wasn’t exactly dying to smelt either. So he’d dream up other corporate activities for himself to engage in, such as Marketing, Long-Range Planning, Management by Objectives, and Lunch, and he’d hire additional managers, who of course would turn right around and hire managers of their own, and so on.