The Power of Inertia

On December 12th, 1917, a single careless decision killed almost 800 people. A few months prior, deep into WWI, the French had sent reinforcements to Italy’s front lines to strengthen their position and improve morale. As the Battle of Caporetto wrapped up, the French troops began hopping back on trains to head back home to spend the holidays with their families before heading back to the war.

Military train 612 stopped at the Modane train station, a small town in the Southeast of France to add two cars as well as pick up their military personnel. The train totaled 19 coaches and about 982 men, which totaled 526 metric tons or over 1 million pounds. Of the 19 coaches, only three had air brakes. The remaining coaches had hand brakes or no brakes at all. Of the carriages that had hand brakes, there weren’t enough brakesmen to use them.

The train was supposed to take them back to Chambéry, with a stop at Saint-Michel-de-Maurienne. The trip from Modane to Saint-Michel-de-Maurienne was steep, at a 3.3% grade. Compounded by the lack of brakes within the coaches, this was too heavy of a load for a single locomotive. Normally, a train with this weight would be driven by two locomotives but the second locomotive was allocated elsewhere. When the driver protested at taking such a heavy load, the transport officer in charge ordered him back to the driver’s cab or face trial for insubordination.

In the face of such choices, the driver hesitantly headed back towards the driver’s cab and took off. He was able to control the train on the first incline, moving as slowly as possible (6mph). However, once the train passed Freney, the train began to accelerate to uncontrollable speeds. Eventually, it passed 135km/h (80mph), as the driver frivolously applied the brakes.

Heading into a sharp left turn where the speed limit was 40km/h (25mph), the train sped by at 102km/h (63mph) and the first coach derailed and flipped. The following cars smashed into the first. Wood debris caught fire from the overheated brakes and the candles the soldiers were using for light. Soldiers were caught in a sudden fiery blast as many attempted to jump from the train wreck. Out of the 982 soldiers who boarded the train, only 183 were present at roll call the next morning.

This is the power of inertia. It keeps you moving, even if you don’t want to. This unconscious force in our lives influences our decision-making process. To be willing to ask a question of change is difficult but necessary. And not enough people are asking it.

Old Dogs Can Learn New Tricks

On July 2nd, 1962, Sam Walton started an empire. The first Walmart was opened in Rogers, Arkansas. He had a simple strategy: The lowest prices, anytime, anywhere. Within five years, Walton had opened 23 more stores, with close to $13 million in sales. In 1970 they went public at $16.50 a share. Since then, Walmart has taken over the United States and the world, employing the most people in the US. Yet, they were caught napping during the dot com boom.

Amazon was founded on July 5th, 1994, nearly 32 years after Walmart. Beginning by selling books online, they quickly expanded to selling anything and everything. Between Amazon Prime, AWS, and their acquisitions of companies such as Whole Foods and Twitch, it’d be hard to live life without Amazon. As they grew quickly during the 2000s and the 2010s, it looked like they had caught Walmart with their pants down.

The internet has changed the world. Entire industries were growing and dying based on their ability to adapt and change to a world with the internet. Walmart seemed to be in the perfect position to capitalize on that change. They had established a nationally loved brand built on the fact you could get what you wanted, whenever you wanted, at the lowest price. But they fumbled it.

Walmart is still the largest retailer in the world, by a long shot. But Amazon is three times more valuable and continues to grow and take over the world. As Amazon continues to claw at the online space, Walmart is left to question what went wrong. And more importantly, are they able to change before it’s too late? In the last few years, it looks like they’ve been able to show the world that an old dog can learn new tricks.

Pivoting is common in companies. When something isn’t working, you take data and ask for feedback. Startups do this all the time, they build a product and ship it. As they collect feedback on how well or how poorly their product is performing, they pivot. Sometimes the pivots are big, such as changing an entire business model, or small, like shipping a new feature. Startup culture is founded upon the mantra “Move fast, break things”. It’s all about testing and iterating upon feedback. Once you get into a large company, it gets much harder. (Hence Facebook’s mantra used to be “Move fast, break things.” Now it’s “Move fast with stable infrastructure”)

Changing anything at a larger corporation is difficult because of one thing: inertia. People are resistant to change because “This is how it’s always been done” or “Submit this to the review process”. In general, this can be a good thing. When you are running a billion or multi-billion-dollar company, you don’t want a single decision to ruin the direction of your company. But if a company is too big and going in the wrong direction, it becomes harder and harder to pull the brakes.

That’s what makes Walmart’s pivot into E-commerce so impressive. After getting beat in online sales by Amazon, having been in business for ~60 years, it seemed like Walmart would’ve been crushed by the weight of inertia. 2019 seems way too late to start and grow an e-commerce business at scale, but they’ve pulled it off.

So What Now?

Walmart did the seemingly impossible. When something wasn’t working, they pivoted. It’s humbling enough to know that you made a mistake and see someone else benefit from it. But learning from a mistake and changing is admirable. If Walmart, which employs over 2 million people, can do it, we can as well.

Too often we work jobs we hate or live in places that disgust us, simply because it’s what we’ve always done. This is inertia playing into our lives. Being able to take a step back and ask “If I wasn’t currently doing X, would I want to do this?” If you weren’t currently working at your job, would you tell yourself to apply for this position? If you weren’t living at your place, would you move there?

Too many parts of our lives we take for granted, simply because it’s what we’ve always done. That’s the wrong approach. To stop inertia from becoming overbearing in our lives, we need to be willing to ask the right questions. If not, we might be picking up the pieces after the crash.

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Best,

Derek