Staying Focused Over the Long Haul

Innovators are always pushed into action when problems affect their personal lives. A frustrating experience with an existing product or service creates the opportunity to find a better way. Many of the greatest innovations in history came about because someone asked, “How can I improve this?”

“The best place to succeed is where you are with what you have.

”

Charles Schwab

In 1953 Malcom McLean was the owner of one of the largest trucking companies in the United States. One day he learned that oil tankers usually carried no cargo above deck. His mind flashed back to a scene that had been etched in his memory 16 years earlier, when he was making a living hauling cotton and tobacco from North Carolina to Hoboken, New Jersey.

McLean wasted a whole day waiting for his used pickup to be unloaded. All day long, he watched dockworkers hoist boxes, crates, and bundles onto slings. Each sling lifted its cargo into the hold of a waiting ship. Inside the ship, workers unloaded the slings and put each item in its place.

“What a waste of time and money!” thought McLean. “Wouldn’t it be great if my trailer could simply be lifted up and placed on the ship without its contents being touched?”

Nineteen years after McLean’s frustrating experience on a New Jersey pier, his first container ship sailed out of Port Newark. The era of containerized shipping had begun.

As early as 1929, a company named Seatrain was rolling railroad cars loaded with cargo onto its sea vessels. But McLean envisioned a system in which trailers without wheels could be stacked on top of one another.

To make his idea work, McLean redesigned trailers: His container would be independent from the trailer bed, so that it could be lifted on and off. He patented a corner-post structure that allowed containers to be gripped for loading and unloading, and which made them strong enough to be stacked.

In less than 15 years, McLean built SeaLand Industries into the biggest cargo shipping company in the world. But it wasn’t a corporation that reinvented the centuries-old shipping industry: One man’s vision did that.

Organizations that have a stake in the status quo are always the least likely innovators. As the owner of the largest trucking company in the southern United States, McLean had a stake. If container shipping became an important form of transportation, it would cut into the profits of his trucking business.

How did McLean handle the situation? He sold his 75% interest in the trucking company and staked everything he had on the future of containerized cargo.

Today 90% of the world’s trade cargo is transported by container shipping. It is a tribute to one man’s focus: The frustrated truck driver who asked, “How can I improve this?”