In 1944, there were 2 million Allied troops fighting in France, they were advancing so fast that supplying them was a massive problem.
Every tank used 5 gallons of fuel per mile, that meant 800,000 gallons a day.
The army needed 20,000 tons of supplies daily, and supplies had to travel 300 miles from Normandy.
6,000 trucks delivered the supplies in convoys 24/7 called the Red Ball Express.
20 trucks would be loaded and assembled into each convoy, then the convoy would be sent out, one convoy every 3 hours.
The problem was, 23% of these supplies (5,000 tons a day) were being destroyed by enemy aircraft.
The Luftwaffe were targeting the convoys, because they were big and easy to spot.
One driver, Sgt Kowalski, had been a truck driver in Pittsburgh before the war and he had a solution.
Instead of bunching 20 trucks into each convoy, send the trucks out one-at-a-time, as soon as they were loaded, at 10-minute intervals.
That way you’d have 20 trucks spread out across 3 hours, over 60 miles of road.
Then the Luftwaffe could only target one truck at a time.
But Kowalski was ignored, he was told by his commanding officer: “You’re just a goddamn truck-driver. Leave the tactics to the boys from West Point.”
Kowalski’s recommendation was rejected, it was stamped: ‘Unauthorised deviation from protocol is prohibited.”
The experts said convoys worked at sea, so they must work the same way on land.
Meanwhile the convoys continued to lose a quarter of their supplies every day.
The situation became so desperate that eventually General Bedell-Smith, Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, got involved.
He gave Sgt Kowalski 20 trucks for one week, to see if his idea made any sense.
On day one, using Kowalski’s method, they lost zero trucks. On day two, they lost one truck. On day three they lost zero trucks.
By the end of the week, losses had dropped from 23% to 2.7%, that’s a 90% reduction in losses.
So successful was Kowalski’s idea that it was adopted for all Allied armies across France, Italy, and Japan.
It was formally designated as ‘Staggered dispatch protocols’.
Today, Kowalski’s method is the basis for the way all front-line military units are kept supplied.
So that’s a very big lesson for us.
Experts are advocates of conventional thinking because that’s how they’ve been taught.
They’ve learned that there is one correct way to do things, and anything else is wrong.
And because we always defer to experts, we assume they know best and we carry on doing it the wrong way.
Because being able to justify the wrong way is more important than trying a new way.
So we carry on listening to experts even when they results are bad.
That’s why we need someone like General Bedell-Smith, who was so desperate he’d try anything.
He could see that listening to experts wasn’t working.
This gave him what George Washington called, “The clarity of desperation”.
It became clear that experts don’t have all the answers so he had to try something else.
That’s when you don’t need experts, you need a result.
You need to listen to the people working where the rubber meets the road.
As General Eisenhower formally wrote:
“Sometimes, the best innovations come not from commanders and theorists, but from the people actually doing the job”.
Napoleon expressed it more pithily, 150 years earlier:
“Generals don’t win battles. Sergeants win battles.”
“Sometimes, the best innovations come not from commanders and theorists, but from the people actually doing the job”.
About 5 years ago, we needed to get a new hoover. My missus asked all her friends what model they had – they all replied the same, a brand that most people have heard of and costs a fortune. She was going to get that one but I had another idea. We are lucky enough to have a cleaner who works in lots of different places so I asked her which hoover to get. She recommended a completely different brand at a third of the price of the expensive one. We followed the cleaner’s advice and are still using the cheaper hoover today.