I give talk yesterday on The Knowing-Doing Gap to executives at BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. They run a system that includes over 100 miles of track in the San Francisco area and that carries almost 400,000 riders a day. I was fortunate enough to get a behind-the-scenes tour of some of the operation. I was impressed with the great job that these people do of keeping this complex system running, and was especially struck by two things.
The first thing was their story about how they built their internal, home grown, computer system for tracking trains and communicating with each other throughout the system. They did it for about 5 million dollars and it is mostly open-source code. It was a classic case where necessity is the mother of invention, or if you prefer different language, where innovation happened because of a big constraint that they had to work around (See what Diego says about constraint and creativity). They couldn’t afford a 20 million dollar proprietary system from an outside vendor, so they had to do something different. The result is that they now have a system that does an impressive job of making information nearly all key aspects of operations easily and quickly available, that fits their needs, and that they can easily modify as they learn along the way. I was also interested in what they had done because I know that one of the causes of Jet Blue’s infamous fiasco on February 14th, 2007, where thousands of passengers were trapped on planes, was that they were using a system from an external vendor to track planes and so on that they had outgrown.
The second thing that I learned was a bit of wisdom from a senior executive who had been at BART for many years. He was describing his leadership philosophy, which emphasized an urgency to act and to make things right. But he also emphasized that the kinds of things they do at BART — running and sustaining such a complex interdependent system — can’t happen without intense information sharing and cooperation. As such, when we were talking about the challenges of managing performance, he commented that there are two kinds of things employees which could make that always provokes his immediate attention: 1. treating others with disrespect and 2. communicating poorly with others. I think that is great advice for any leader.
I’ve been riding BART for over 25 years and it does work very well. It was impressive to see it from the inside. Certainly, they face all sorts of political challenges and other problems, but I think they are doing a mighty good job. Most of the trains do run on time!
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