This content is locked. Please login or become a member.
In the 1950s Japan was rebuilding from World War II and one of the things that the country’s leaders decided is that they needed to improve the nation’s railway system. Because most people didn’t have cars, many of the goods that would move around Japan moved by train. The head of the railway system who was incredibly powerful sat down with his top engineers and he said, “I need you to make trains that can go 120 miles per hour. And the engineers basically laughed him out of the room.” They said “120 miles per hour is impossible. Our fastest trains right now go 55 miles per hour. Maybe we could get them up to 65, perhaps 70 miles per hour. But 120 miles per hour, like, that’s never going to happen.” And the head of the railway system said “Look, we’re rebuilding an entire country. If we just pursue incremental change, we’re only going to see incremental growth, and that’s not fast enough. We need to leapfrog. We need to move into the future as fast as humanly possible. I want 120 miles per hour.”
Now the fact that building a train that was 120 miles per hour was impossible sort of sparked this new wave of innovation. It forced all the engineers to start looking at this problem completely differently. Previously they had been focused on making locomotives that were faster and faster and faster. But they said, “We can’t get a locomotive that’s as fast as 120 miles per hour. The only way we can do that is if we actually make every single car on a train its own locomotive.“ So they went and they designed this brand new engine that they could put in each railway car.
But then they said “Look, if every railway car has its own engine, it makes the trains too heavy. So what we need to do is we need to come up with a completely new way of making tracks. We can’t have any seams in the tracks.” And so they invented this new way to extrude metal track so there’s no seams. But then they found that even if you have all of these trains where every single car is its own locomotive and you have these new fancy tracks, just the law of physics is such that you can’t have too many twists and turns in a train’s journey. And the problem with Japan is that it’s very mountainous. The railroad tracks that existed, they would wind between hills. And they said, “The only way that we can get up to 120 miles per hour is if we bulldoze through all these hills, if we build all these tunnels so that the tracks are straight and these new kind of railway cars can move on top of them and we’re using brand new tracks.”
Within three years, they had rethought every single aspect of how trains worked. Within five years, they had built a train that could go 120 miles per hour. That was the birth of the bullet train. Today bullet trains are all over the world. Not only did it completely revolutionize Japan, it’s revolutionized transportation. The innovations that came out of the invention of the bullet train have impacted everything from aviation to how we build cars. But the only reason that this happened, the only reason this huge ambition worked is because the head of the railway system said, “You have to try and do something that’s impossible.”
To do something truly innovative, to do something that’s revolutionary, you have to have a stretch goal. You have to identify this ambition that’s almost impossible because that’s when people will start thinking differently. That’s when they’ll start coming up with solutions that no one has ever thought of before. Otherwise, if you just look for incremental growth, incremental changes, all the improvements will also be incremental. You’ll never turn the world on its head.
Study after study has found that if you want to unleash people’s innovative capacities, if you want to come up with something genuinely new and better, if you want to really become more productive, what you should do is you should start with a stretch goal in mind, something that seems almost impossible but that sparks you to think about the problem differently because that’s the only way you can try and get close to this big audacious ambition that everyone is chasing after.