On Topic: Supply, demand and a dash of patience

There are a handful of wise, but imperfectly remembered, management sayings I've tried to keep alive in my head. Among them are:

' Carly Fiorina's don't let others judge the value of your worth

' Dwight Eisenhower's sometimes a bad plan is better than no plan

' Arthur Carlson's 'As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”

OK, maybe I'm kidding about that last one. But I'm mostly serious about this one: Patience isn't a virtue.

If you're wondering who said that, I think it was me.

I'm not claiming to be the first or even the only person ever to make that pronouncement. I had thought it would be a great title for a management book I had a notion, for a brief, flickering moment, to write on patience - until I decided I might not be the ideal candidate for such a topic.

I admit to once having walked over to a co-worker whom I felt the increasing need to speak with and who was taking far too long - I thought - to conclude her conversation with whomever was on the other end of the call and, well, hung up the phone. (The whole thing was funnier then than it might seem now.)

I also confess to having thrown an uncooperative telephone out a second-floor window (back in the days when you actually could open office-building windows). (The phone was attached by its cord to the wall, so no one on the sidewalk below was injured.)

Be assured, those incidents were in my salad days, and I'm much less impulsive of late. But here's what I mean about this patience thing.

In a story just last week, NPR talked about how Uber, the ride-sharing business, sets it prices based on what Northwestern University researcher Christo Wilson called 'surge pricing.”

If passengers are in heavy-demand areas or times, they pay more. A surge generally lasts 10 minutes, Wilson and his co-researchers found in their New York City- and San Francisco-based study, and prices update every five minutes.

But, Wilson said in the radio interview, 'What we see is that demand drops precipitously, cars stop getting booked and drivers are just sitting there.”

For the record, Uber disputes the researchers' findings, and in fact redesigned its drivers' app in October.

What's actually happening, though? My guess is those passengers who tapped their apps for an Uber ride lose patience - in 10 minutes or less - and call a 'regular” taxi.

Maybe it also could be they hiked over a few blocks to less-busy territory - and saved some money.

I guess where I'm going with this that, most of the time, patience is a good thing. Negotiations always require a vast resource of the virtue.

But on occasion time is important, too.

Sometimes less can be more.

' Michael Chevy Castranova is enterprise and Sunday business editor of The Gazette. (319) 398-5873; michaelchevy.castranova@thegazette.com