have all experienced it sometime; when a project’s main objectives have already been achieved, we then relax and do just enough to keep everything working. Let’s face it, we humans are lazy by nature, but if we want to better ourselves and reach new heights, we have to fight against complacency and lack of vision.
This is not restricted just to business matters. The path of least resistance also thrives in a variety of areas, such as:
• Looking after our body and personal health.
• Our relationship with our partner and/or children.
• Managing friendships and free time.
• Intellectual, artistic and even spiritual goals.
Whether out of laziness or because of the fast pace of our lives, we end up eating and sleeping in the same way, until our body gives us a serious warning, or we become stale with our partner until a crisis is provoked, and so on in all areas of our lives.
From time to time we make little adjustments and improvements, like the employees with their quarterly reviews, but they are just band-aids that fail to change the situation in any meaningful way.
It is not always a matter of laziness. Sometimes we are simply busy maintaining what we have devoted so much time to building, and we have neither the time nor the energy to take it to the next level.
Or perhaps true change scares us?
Mikawa’s secret
Jack Welch agonized over this problem, which is so typical of the human condition: how to motivate employees of the divisions that were already working quite well, so that they would take risks and keep on innovating?
He would find the answer on a trip he made to Tokyo in 1993.
On this trip he met Eiji Mikawa, the chairman of General Electric’s Japanese subsidiary and a specialist in medical technology.
Welch was impressed by the speed at which they introduced changes, outperforming the rest of General Electric’s divisions; the Japanese subsidiary had been launching the best and fastest TAC (computed tomography) machines in the world onto the market for years.
Mikawa explained to Welch the secret that inspired the book you are holding:
“If you want a train to go 10 km/h faster, you just add more horsepower to the engine. But if you need to go from 150 km/h to 300 km/h, you have to think about many other things.
Do we need to change all the tracks and make them wider? Do we have to change the suspension system?
Do we need to make the passenger cars more aerodynamic?
You have to think differently—outside the box. You won’t get a new train with a few modifications. You need to start from scratch with a whole new way of thinking.” *
A seemingly impossible assignment
To find the origin of this eye-opening concept, we have to go back to the year 1958. In the midst of the post-war economic miracle, the Japanese government issued direct orders to JR (Japan Railways) to find a quicker way to connect Tokyo with Osaka.
A few months later, the JR engineers presented a proposal for a train that would travel at an average speed of 100 km/h. This was a breakneck speed for the time and, had this first project become a reality, it would have resulted in one of the fastest trains in the world.
However, the JR executives’ response to the engineers was utterly unexpected:
“We need a train that goes twice as fast.”
The engineers were utterly astonished, and said it was absolutely impossible to achieve that; a 200 km/h train belonged to the realm of science-fiction movies.
The executives replied that they could spend as much money as they wanted since the government had given them carte blanche for that seemingly impossible project.
The Shinkansen effect
The engineers came back a few months later with a new proposal that implied a comprehensive change in all aspects of the future train. To achieve such an outrageous speed, they would need to:
• Change the shape, height and width of the railway tracks that had been used up until then in Japan.
• Spend a large part of the budget on making tunnels to cross the mountainous area around Mount Fuji.
• Completely redesign the concept of “a train” that people had at that time in order to come up with a lighter and more aerodynamic one and thus overcome air resistance.
Essentially, it would have been enough to carry out one or two improvements to gain 10 km/h, but to double the speed you had to change everything and approach this mode of transport with an entirely new way of thinking.
This radical change, this Shinkansen effect, is widely used in engineering and business, but we can also apply to all the “divisions” of our life.
To come back to the engineers’ “almost impossible mission,” in 1964—just six years after the government had thrown down the challenge—the first bullet train in history was inaugurated for the Tokyo Olympics.
Achieving a milestone that caused astonishment around the world, the Shinkansen connected Tokyo to Osaka at more than 200 km/h, cutting down the journey time between the two cities from six hours forty minutes to three hours ten minutes.
The innovations that came about through the development of the first bullet train in history would revolutionize train transportation on the entire planet for decades.
The first step towards that great breakthrough, the benefits of which are still visible today, came about when an entirely new way of thinking was adopted.
Shinkansen: The Bullet Train
The term shinkansen (新幹線) literally means “new trunk line.” The Japanese word is made up of the characters 新, “new,” 幹, “trunk” and 線, “line.” At the time of its inauguration, in 1964, the train called Hikari (The Light) covered the new trunk line route between Tokyo and Osaka, becoming the first high-speed train in history, reaching a speed in excess of 200 km/h. Both the Hikari train and the Shinkansen line came to be widely known abroad as “the Japanese bullet train.”
Shinkansen thinking
Eiji Mikawa was fond of talking about how “bullet train thinking” was applied to everything in his company. For example, if the directors in one of his divisions told him they were planning to reduce costs by five percent, he would ask them to think of ways to reduce them by fifty percent.
Jack Welch was so impressed by Eiji Mikawa’s approach that he imported the philosophy and applied it to General Electric, where he asked all his employees and divisions to add “bullet train objectives” to their quarterly reviews.
This is one of the main reasons why General Electric has remained competitive and continues to innovate, even though the company was founded more than a hundred years ago
