Tag: Robert de Niro

Tips for Business Start Ups: why skills and knowledge are hugely overrated attributes in your potential workforce.

Alfie confided in me that the beauty of running a taxi business was that you didn’t need to know many things at all to make it succeed.

You didn’t need to be able to speak – many customers preferred you not to speak in fact; you didn’t need to be able to listen as your customers could either write down or text you their destination; you didn’t need to be able to add up as the meter did all the calculations and you certainly didn’t need to know where you were or where you were going as the Satnav would do that for you.

His next business challenge was to find a way of employing drivers who didn’t know how to drive or indeed recognise a motor vehicle in the first place.

He will find a rich vein of potential employees from the job centres or universities who will only too happily join his business and apply their lack of skills of driving and knowledge about taxis to great effect. They will join the growing band of aspirant Robert de Niro brothers who are only missing the obligatory Glock which would entitle them to call themselves fully paid up members of the taxi driving profession.

The notion that a complete absence of skill and knowledge in your workforce can benefit your business is a useful one which many other start up businesses – or even longstanding corporates – would do well to learn from.

Alfie has in fact recently left a telecoms giant where the inability to communicate with human beings was a real asset. His taxi business is clearly set to go far (just make sure you don’t get in one of his cabs if you want to make it home safely).

Taxi wisdom: give a guy a Satnav and he thinks he’s Robert De Niro. Number 7 in the series: Knowledge, traffic and arts based research.

Whilst taxi drivers seem to losing their abilities to know where they are, where they’ve been and where they’re going, they have no shortage of knowledge about the state of the world we’re in and where we all should be.

What is it about taxi drivers that means that for better for worse, we feel obliged to engage in banter about celebrities, footballers, politicians and the dog across the road who is urinating into the nearest macdonalds burger wrapper? Do they have some mystical power, sat there in front of their cab, staring at you with one eye through the rear view mirror, which means they can hold forth on any subject under the sun whilst reducing you to a mumbling wreck who will agree with almost anything until the ride stops, you pays your money and insist on a receipt for the journey from hell and back?

There are some honorable exceptions though. A driver this morning, whilst opining on the terrible story that is unravelling around Jimmy Saville, offered the astute observation that the only thing he believed in the newspapers was the date at the top of the page. A breath of fresh air from the usual polluted atmosphere you find in the backs of cabs.

There must be a great business opportunity out there for someone to set up a cab firm who employed drivers who knew where they were going, how to get there in the shortest possible time and in a manner which was both civilised and civilising.

More travel knowledge here.