Edit post

Edit your reply below.

Post Body
Enter your post below.
History is an excellent teaching tool and certainly usefull in figuring out who to blame for legal proceedings, but past performance does not always predict future success and often decisions have to be made based on incomplete or unknown information. The results and an accurate assesment of some aspects may not be possible for years afterward. Those who made the decision and approved it may be long gone and if there's no possibiility to do it over, there's little to be gained by spending a a lot of time looking backwards. CEOs and boards just don't have the time to do much of that. <br /> <br />Business schools also do case studies into something called the Technology Life Cycle, which gets into the risks, rewards, costs, and service life of technology at various points in time. In that context, dieselization and the demise of steam followed a very typical pattern. Early adopters at the leading edge in the 30s took the greatest risk, but solved specific problems i.e. lower cost lightweight passenger trains designed to increase ridership and market share. Early FT adopters used them to solve operational problems with long non-electrified tunnels i.e. Stampede & Moffat. By the post war period when most roads dieselized, the technology was new but proven both by the early users and wartime use by the Navy. Many of the F3's purchased at this time were later upgraded to F9's and continued to run in mainline service well past the date Brown's study was done. Steam was in the obsolete phase of the life cycle and like buying a Pentium 3 notebook or analog cell phone today, had a very short service life. <br /> <br />Some organizations are very sucessful at betting the company on new technology. Boeing has done this repeatedly with the B17, 707, 747, and most recently the 777. Others I won't mention, constantly look over their shoulder at something they shouldn't have done and get run over by something unexpected. Railroads with a few exceptions, tend to be fairly conservative, and as an industry dieselized following the classic business school model, albeit some much better than others. Deploying new technology across a distributed organization is one of the most difficult strategic decisions organizations face. When it doesn't produce the expected results for an entire industry, the reasons are usually complex, similar to engineering disasters which involve multiple component failures in unanticipated ways. Was the engineer who designed the World Trade Center an incompetent fool because he did not forsee a terrorist crashing a fully loaded jumbo jet into it?
Tags (Optional)
Tags are keywords that get attached to your post. They are used to categorize your submission and make it easier to search for. To add tags to your post type a tag into the box below and click the "Add Tag" button.
Add Tag