By Alex Frankel

Fast Company, September 1, 1998

"Instead of dispatchers telling you what to do, you tell them what you can do," says Justin de Jesus, 25, one of Zap Courier's elite fleet.

Zap Courier is one of the fastest - and fastest-growing - bike-messenger services in the Bay Area. Its fleet of 15 expert riders makes more than 300 deliveries each day to clients including Levi-Strauss, Miller- Freeman, and Pentagram Design.

Still, Zap's founder, Chris Neal, 35, knows that keeping up with the digital-era expectations of 200-plus clients takes more than sheer leg power.

That's why Neal jumped at the chance to adopt a state-of-the-art computer- aided dispatching system known as "free call." Rather than depend on "addled dispatchers" to field calls, troubleshoot problems, and assign delivery jobs or "tags," says Neal, the free-call protocol pushes information down to the street level - literally.

Tags are called out in a constant stream over two-way radios to messengers in the field, who evaluate the job requirements to determine the best rider for the job. That autonomy means real results, says Neal: "When a messenger is allowed to follow his or her own initiative and intimate knowledge of the street, the job just gets done faster."