Jerry Strahan, general manager of street-vendor Lucky Dogs, has spent nearly 30 years shepherding a staff of vagrants, thieves, and other miscreants. A lesson in the true basics of good managing.
You think you have problems with your workers? Compare your staff with the unruly employees at Lucky Dogs. Managing them takes a special kind of skill
If Jerry Strahan were the kind of manager who demanded whip-crack obedience, his tenure at Lucky Dogs Inc. would have been as short-lived as a wiener left out in the New Orleans summer sun. But Strahan demands virtually nothing from his employees, which is why he has survived 28 years in a position Job would have quit on the second day. As general manager for the approximately $3-million hot-dog-vending company, Strahan rides herd on a workforce lousy with drifters, alcoholics, insubordinates, petty thieves, not-so-petty thieves, brawlers, and the occasional psychopath. To tat a profitable enterprise from these loosest of loose threads, he has learned to be endlessly patient, flexible to the point of fluidity, and content to take his victories where he finds them.
Today, for example, Strahan is mildly exultant because Kenneth Schmitt has finally moved out of the elevator shaft. It's not that Schmitt couldn't afford his own digs; the hot-dog vendor was sufficiently flush to put down six months' rent on an apartment the day he left. But the shaft--which houses a primitive rope-pulled system that hasn't been used in years--had much to recommend it, including space enough for a bedroll and proximity to a shower and walk-in cooler. Then there were the claims of tradition: another vendor had inhabited the shaft in Lucky Dogs' previous quarters on Decatur Street on the fringes of New Orleans's sultry French Quarter. "The elevator shafts are very popular in this company," says Strahan dryly.
Strahan, a broadly built man of 48, is quick to point out that live-in help is not the norm at Lucky Dogs. When Schmitt moved in a year ago, the general manager had done what he does countless times every day--chosen his battles. And given Schmitt's 14 years of service as a more-on-than-off-again weenie vendor and the fact that he no longer showed up for work dressed as John Wayne or Doris Day, Strahan opted not to fight that one. "If anyone else asks, 'Can we sleep in the shop?' the answer is no," Strahan says. "That elevator shaft will never be occupied again. That's a rule I hope we won't have to break."
But at Lucky Dogs rules are made to be broken, not to mention laughed at, ignored, or simply not understood. "We make a set of rules and they're good for about 10 minutes," says Strahan. "You have to set rules, you have to semi-enforce them, you have to be very forgiving when they're not followed; otherwise you don't have carts out. You can't eliminate the madness. Sometimes you can control it."
Certainly, the men and women who propel Lucky Dogs' 10-foot-long hot-dog-shaped carts through the Quarter's nightly bacchanalia are unlikely adherents of corporate orthodoxy. They include people like day manager Paul Hager, a bluff fellow with thatchy white eyebrows, whose efforts at staff discipline have at times degenerated into slapping and shoving matches. ("If you've got some you can't reason with, you actually have to get physical with 'em," Hager drawls.) Then there's Larry Griffiths, a onetime aerospace engineer laid low by downsizing and lithium. Once, just days after a coworker warned Strahan that a note threatening Strahan's life had been found in Griffiths's apartment, Griffiths called Strahan to hit him up for cigarette money. And Joe Mayfield (recently deceased), who many years ago stole $800 from Lucky Dogs' safe, skipped town for a long stretch, and was eventually made a manager after his--and some of the money's--return. Talking with those people or listening to Strahan recount their biographies, you begin to suspect that some invisible hand has lifted the country by its northernmost edge and given it a good shake, sending all the loose bits tumbling down to New Orleans, where they've settled at Lucky Dogs.
You are also reminded that running a company, like raising a child, is not a by-the-book activity for everyone. In the real world every company is a unique amalgam of personalities, history, and environment, a messy organism that must be managed with skill and ambition, yes, but also with realistic expectations and at least a smidgen of unconditional love. Strahan's choices are often counterintuitive; many would undoubtedly dismiss them as plain wrong. But by playing to Lucky Dogs' idiosyncrasies and accepting the limitations inherent in managing below Maslow's hierarchy, he has both kept the company functioning and helped to make it successful.
Strahan doesn't presume to recommend any best practices--unless they're for making the best of a bad situation. But at Lucky Dogs, as at any company, sometimes that's the most you can do.
Considering how motley Lucky Dogs' real-life crew is, it's ironic that the company's most flagrantly peculiar employee is fictional. He is one Ignatius J. Reilly, the elephantine, hairy-eared, hunting-hatted, bellicose nutcase who is the hero of John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Confederacy of Dunces. In Confederacy, Ignatius's listless quest for employment lands him at Paradise Vendors Inc., a street-vending company of indifferent hygiene staffed by the dregs of the scum of the earth. ("I wouldn't eat nothing outta one of them dirty wagons anyway. They all operated by a bunch of bums," says Ignatius's mother, voicing a sentiment expressed repeatedly throughout the novel.) Paradise Vendors, as anyone in New Orleans will tell you, was modeled after the Lucky Dogs of the 1960s, a time when it had "a very bad name in the city," says Doug Talbot, the company's owner since 1969. "The vendors were just about all wild. People thought they were dirty. Unsafe. Rude."
Lucky Dogs' nontraditional workforce got a second airing in 1998, when Strahan published a memoir of his quarter-century with the company, Managing Ignatius: The Lunacy of Lucky Dogs and Life in the Quarter (Louisiana State University Press). That book focuses chiefly on the 1970s and 1980s, when the vending pool reached dizzying heights of disrepute. "I can remember guys sitting around comparing wardens," says Strahan. In those days the company's workers--mostly shell-shocked Vietnam vets and wintering carnival workers--lived in more or less constant thrall to the neighborhood's exotic pleasures. The neighborhood was different, too. "When we were in the Quarter, it was sailors, it was hookers," says Strahan, nostalgically. "Today it's House of Blues, it's Planet Hollywood."
