Last week I attended a business leadership talk by Jason Jennings. He spoke about the 5 secrets of successful businesses and gave examples of Koch, Walmart, Nike, IKEA, and Smuckers among others. He has met with all these CEOs and researched their strategies, styles, and chronicled their success stories. I really envy his job.
Jennings is a very engaging speaker and I took plenty of notes during the talk, expecting to write them down here. But, before I spent all that time typing, I did a quick Google search, and as can be expected, The VAR Guy already wrote an excellent summary of this exact same talk which Jennings gave at the Cisco Partnership Summit last year. The VAR guy's summary covers all but one of the takeaways I noted down. Perhaps Jennings didn't tell that story last year, or perhaps the VAR guy didn't think it was worth writing about, but I think it's worth repeating.
The story came up when Jennings was talking about successful businesses giving up old conventions.
Do you know the width of the US railroad gauges? It's 4 ft, 8.5 inches. Odd number isn't it? Well, here's how it came to be. (And once again, I looked at Google to provide me the typed out anecdote.)
The US standard railroad gauge is 4 feet, 8.5 inches wide because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the US Railroads.
Why did the English build them like that?
Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.
Why did "they" use that gauge then?
Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.
Okay! Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?
Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.
So who built those old rutted roads?
Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.
And the ruts in the roads?
Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.
The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. And bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it, you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses!
Now the twist to the story...
When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory at Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to
be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.
So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass!!
If this is not a good enough anecdote to get us to start thinking unconventionally, then I don't know what is. :)
Jennings is a very engaging speaker and I took plenty of notes during the talk, expecting to write them down here. But, before I spent all that time typing, I did a quick Google search, and as can be expected, The VAR Guy already wrote an excellent summary of this exact same talk which Jennings gave at the Cisco Partnership Summit last year. The VAR guy's summary covers all but one of the takeaways I noted down. Perhaps Jennings didn't tell that story last year, or perhaps the VAR guy didn't think it was worth writing about, but I think it's worth repeating.
The story came up when Jennings was talking about successful businesses giving up old conventions.
Do you know the width of the US railroad gauges? It's 4 ft, 8.5 inches. Odd number isn't it? Well, here's how it came to be. (And once again, I looked at Google to provide me the typed out anecdote.)
The US standard railroad gauge is 4 feet, 8.5 inches wide because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the US Railroads.
Why did the English build them like that?
Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.
Why did "they" use that gauge then?
Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.
Okay! Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?
Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.
So who built those old rutted roads?
Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.
And the ruts in the roads?
Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.
The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. And bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it, you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses!
Now the twist to the story...
When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory at Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to
be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.
So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass!!
If this is not a good enough anecdote to get us to start thinking unconventionally, then I don't know what is. :)
this is hilarious :)
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