Innovators wanted

Years ago, when I first launched myself into a career of writing about trucks and trucking, most of my friends wondered why. The gearheads among them understood my attraction to the machinery of our industry, but the rest… well, they were part of that large group I call “civilians” nowadays. They just didn’t understand. It took me a while to change their minds, but it didn’t, on the other hand, take long for me to realize why I’d made a good move.

It was the people, of course. Trucking folks are not like ordinary mortals, and that was clear to me within weeks. They’re not super heroes, nothing like that, and I don’t mean to romanticize or exaggerate them–you–in any way at all. Our industry is like any other, holding some people I wouldn’t take home to meet Mom!

Unlike those others, however, trucking is far more densely populated by people who are natural entrepreneurs, who innovate for a living. And I found them–still do–energizing. Challenging. Just plain interesting.

So I’m happy to say that we’re about to launch an on-going series of articles, starting in March, profiling the most innovative people in Canadian trucking, as proposed by you, their peers and colleagues. It will culminate in our selecting an ‘Innovator of the Year’ in December, and will be sponsored by a company that is itself ready to innovate (which I can’t name yet because the ink on this deal wasn’t quite dry at press time). Look for details in our next issue.

I hesitate to add yet another award program to an already solid list, but as far as I’m aware, none of the others focus on innovation particularly. There’s service to the industry, heroism, and a few others, all of them very worthwhile. But it seems to me that at this juncture in our joint history, the single talent that will best pave the way ahead is the ability to conceive and then actually do things that bust open the envelope, if I can murder a cliché.

So what do I mean by innovation? What kind of people am I talking about?

Innovators are different. They’re curious, self-motivated and ready to take risks. Visionary and competitive, they see possibilities where others see blank screens. In 2005, the chances are very good that innovators will achieve business superiority through their use of information technology. New ideas in dealing with the human side of things–not just drivers but everyone–are also likely to separate the average company from the excellent one. But the point here is that innovators routinely break the mold, so I’m just guessing.

In thinking about all of this, I was taken back to an afternoon some time in the early 1980s when a young Tom Kleysen and I played hooky from the Manitoba Trucking Association convention for an hour or two. He wanted to show me around the Kleysen Transport facilities and I happily complied. Part of the tour included a trek out to the back 40 where there was ample evidence of Hubert Kleysen’s –Tom’s dad–inventive spirit. Experiments on the equipment side of things were everywhere, some of them used and then superceded by something better, others that never saw action. Big machines, some of them, though 20 years later I can’t remember much more than that. It doesn’t matter, the point being that Hubert was forever thinking about ways to do things better.

Curious, self-motivated, and ready to take risks–together with a welding torch–that was Hubert Kleysen. It’s no coincidence that in later years it was him, with others, who spearheaded the idea that Winnipeg could be a multi-modal transport hub for all of North America.

A few years before that Kleysen tour I met and became friends with another pioneer, Max Rapaport. A much respected Toronto transport lawyer, just retired by the time I met him, he can be credited with some quite revolutionary out-of-the-box thinking–the inland sufferance warehouse was his idea, if I remember the story correctly. No small thing, no small innovation.
On a more tangible, practical level, over the years I’ve seen individual truckers invent things like ladders for climbing on to a flatdeck, brake-stroke indicators, you name it. Quite recently I had a close look at Transport Robert’s home-grown tracking system that has every driver in Canada equipped with a Blackberry handheld device that links to the dispatch office. It’s slick, it’s easy, and it’s definitely innovative.

The point is, there’s no shortage of interesting breakthrough ideas in Canadian trucking, and we aim to celebrate them month by month. If we define innovation as the successful exploitation of new ideas, our industry does that every day. So tell me about the best of them in your world, please. If we don’t pat ourselves on the back, who will?