YouSaid · the spoken record

Keith Creel

lines on the record: 111
first: 2022-11-29
most recent: 2022-11-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I went and pulled probably three years of discipline records and I spent days reading investigations. And effectively investigation is just a formal contractual requirement to sit down and sort of get to what happened and why it happened. And employees have an opportunity to explain their story and you sort of develop the facts and determine if something was broken. So I read through all that. And we got a lot right, but we got a lot wrong. And, you know, it was all in the spirit of trying to do the right thing because the reality of the culture that we inherited was a culture of permissiveness. And in our industry, I'll go back to the point of not a bad person, but a bad fit. If you allow people to create their own culture and”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. This is a sensitive word. You think about discipline, and we haven't gotten this all right. And in fact, I remember. One of the first things I dealt with is the CEO. There was an article that came out. In a Canadian publications, and it was about this culture of fear that had been created at Canadian Pacific. As a human being, I believe in treating people with respect. And some of the examples that I read make the hairs in the back of my neck stand up. So after that,”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because they're trying to get you to do something different than what society or history says you should do. Change is not comfortable for anyone. But he was a change agent. He did the right thing. And that's the one other key thing he taught me. He said, Keith, in your career, are you going to work with a lot of managers that want to do things right, but very few that want to lead and leaders do the right things, even whether or not the comfortable thing to do? And that was his point about driving change. Often change threatens people. You've got to be able to articulate why you need to change and how you need to change and stick with it, even if it's not comfortable. And that leads to greatness. That was kind of the way he was wired. And I learned a lot from that. My style is a bit different. But those lessons, you know, to me, I think are universal and I think they're undeniably true. And I think they lead to success in any business. And most specifically in our business.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he required that level of knowledge and that level of deep dive, like no person that I've ever met before or no person that I've ever met since. It creates an environment that not only, if you get it right, you get to keep your job in his terms. He was big on accountability. You got to produce results. It goes back to his number one. I don't care how much I like. If you don't do your job, there's somebody else that's going to come in to do it for you. I've got that responsibility. But when you do that and you understand that level of detail, you can start optimizing those processes. And that leads to that's better service product, that lower cost, that better asset turns. Those kind of lessons for 20 years, and I never quit learning from Hunter, he was always teaching. And if you listen, he was, some would say he's controversial. He was a visionary, and I would suggest that most pioneers and visionaries are.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, I've got imbalance. I've got to run a special train. It doesn't have a train max to bring the crew back. So I've got a deadhead cruise. I've got a deadhead locomotives. There's all kinds of inefficiencies that in four years of experience, I never thought about all those unattended outcomes. Well, with him, he was so in tune with all the nuts and bolts of the way scheduled railroading worked that to survive those phone calls, I had to learn too.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Friday, the way customers release cars, that's when your business builds up. You have more cars coming in the term because historically they didn't work weekends. They come back in on Monday. They load the cars that were spotted that have sat there for two days, unused. Then they release them. And by the time you pull them back in your terminal, you've got no cars Monday, Tuesday. A lot of cars Wednesday Thursday, Friday. Well, if on Tuesday I miss 10 cars, well, on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, that pressure builds up and I have more trains that I have capacity, more demand cars, that I have trains to move it on. Going back to what I said one train a day, it's all defined on the business that you have. And I've created an unnatural outcome whereby Saturday or Sunday, I've got a train worth of extra cars and I've got an additional train start to run, which leads into all kinds of other inefficiencies.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know Keith Creel, I see Tower, and you hear this deep bare-tone voice, and it's not, hey, this is Hunter Harrison. How are you doing? It's, why did you leave 10 cars off MENO? And I said, excuse me? He said, this is Hutter Harrison. And I hit mute. And my yard master's there. And I'm like, somebody's played a game. This isn't Hunter. It's 2 o'clock in the morning. And he immediately turned his eyes and looked at me. He said, Keith, that's Mr. Harris. His voice is undeniable. You better pick the phone up. So I did. And I went through 30 minutes of an understanding because in my mind, I left 10 cars. But it is mine. As he explained to me, it's not the 10 cars. Yes, those ten customers will get their traffic a day later, but it's all the unattended consequences. So think about the 10 today. What happens when you get into the later cycles of the business,”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That particular day, it was a big train, I think 140, 135 cars. It was a full pin train optimized as 150 cars with the IC model. And again, that goes back to size of the train, linked the train to size of sidings, all those things that I described earlier. So, you know, we're at 135, 140 cars. I think we did a great job. O'clock in the morning, my phone rings. As you can imagine, the phone is ringing all the time. You're hitting speaker phone all the time. You're on the phone with the dispatcher. You're talking to the Yard Master. You're talking to Cruz. It's managed chaos. You've got radios in the back room. And I hit the speaker phone.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I remember we had a train design, which was kind of new to me, but it prescribed all the blocks and precision scheduled railroading means you run the same train every day at the same time. And there's a sequence to everything. So there was a particular train that was called M-E-N-O, Memphis in New Orleans was the train. And it left at 3 o'clock in the afternoon every day. Well, you see what your day knowing, you know, there's a train that leaves at 1 p.m. This train leads at 3 p.m. Had to make connections, you're switching your cars to make these blocks that make up this trend.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I thought I knew a little bit about running trains from my previous four years of experience. Went to Memphis, Tennessee. I was in a tower, and in our terms a tower train master, sort of like an air traffic control. You've got a yard master that's directing trade movements and you're in the background overseeing the priorities and the coordination, connecting all the dots, building the train plans.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've got so many of them. I'll tell you, though, he was a master at doing that. He would raise the bar so high that even if you didn't make it all the way, you were accomplishing a whole lot more than anybody else was because he caused you, he created a world where you had to stretch. You had to really understand your business in every detail and drill issues to the root cause and define what good looks like in a way that you don't know what you don't know and you don't think it's possible. And I'll tell you this one situation. Back when I first really was learning the way he thought, my mind, I worked in another railroad for four years before I joined the Illinois Central, where I first met Hunter. And my first job, I worked my way up from a frontline operating position. I pride myself in being an operating officer.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More with people than I could ever do myself. It really gets my gears going, and that's really what drives me day in and day out. And he was wired the same way. He loved, loved serving people and serving a bigger cause more than himself”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I find that people enjoy that and it's more than the money. It's an emotional connection that creates this virtual cycle of success. And he fundamentally taught me all those things. I know working for him probably the most challenging individual I've ever worked for in my life. But at the same time, the most rewarding because we achieved so much for so many people, not just ourselves. We are serving a bigger cause, not serving ourselves. seeing the success we created for customers at an individual level, seeing families that were positively impacted, seeing employees, seeing jobs grow, seeing people enjoy a better quality of life that I know in my experience, I never would have dreamed possible. That means a lot to me. So to be able to accomplish”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Feel a sense of accomplishment and a sense of pride and a sense of satisfaction. And it creates success and it breeds success. Once you experience it, We all have experienced that are live, whether it's on a sports team or whether it's in a local organization or the company you work for, once you've done that once.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Accountability, leadership, the importance of leadership, picking the right people. Creating the right culture. Delivering results. I mean, he's always, he told me from the very beginning as a leader, you're number one job is to produce results. You're only going to do it if you have the right people on your team and you create the right culture and give them the right motivation to succeed. And as a leader, to me, that's what leadership's about. You have to create a vision. You got to tell people what's important and why it's important. Got to hold them accountable and you got to motivate them. And if you do that, most people, I think God made us in a way that we all want to be part of something successful. When we allow people to contribute to something that's bigger than themselves,”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really be really good at them. That's kind of the simple approach to business. And that recipe has allowed us to Sustain to grow, outgrow the industry, to do it efficiently because we're turning assets that naturally controls your cost, that produces a good margin. It's an outcome. It's not the focus. And at the same time, it's a great service because, again, it's schedule. It's more truff-like and reliable, and our customers can depend on not only just the service, but also the capacity so that not only can we do what we've told them we're going to do, when they commit to their customers to grow, There's a clear path to what that growth looks like, whether it's investment, whether it's we tweak our service. It's not done, it's not guesswork, I guess. There's a science to it in a very structured approach to it.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Physical assets, terminal assets before we sell the product. So it's truly a triangle where you have the marketing, you have this capacity or asset utilization piece in the middle, and then you have operations. And we all together collectively make decisions. And to me, that's been a recipe for success, eliminating the silos that most organizations have, where you have marketing going out and selling a product and then operations, they're told to deliver it. Well, marketing does it even understand if Operations can't really deliver it. So they're overcommitting the company. Operations, they're doing their best to try to deliver, but because they've overcommitted, they've exceeded capacity or they've complicated the delivery of the product, you know, trying to liken it at Tabasco Robbins. You can't have 52 flavors. You know, pick the few that you're good at and have.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we have a very unique position that was created. Actually, when I took over as the CEO, because I'm so sensitive about Matching capacity and not oversubscribing our network. So we have an individual, a team that sets between literally myself and marketing. So when it comes to pursuing business, securing business, there's a very methodical approach to it so that we're matching track capacity, yard capacity, people capacity, locomotive pec capacity, and car capacity. So this one particular group. I call them, they maintain the tension in an organization. They're not about harmony. They're about doing the right thing. So they have to assess the marketing opportunities and in turn they sign off on we have the capacity, whether it's track people.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But Canadian national or the other railroads on the US standpoint indoor, it's individually privately owned and they understand the importance of that piece of the supply chain and it's a revenue stream for them and they just it's not for sale.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is sometimes it's a government owned entity. Sometimes it's a private entity. And there's now willingness to sell it. I can give you a couple of cases. In one in Canadian Sol, there's a couple of terminals that if I had control to your point about vertical integration of the port, I could control throughput. I would argue that we could probably be a bit more efficient because there's so many complexities in those handoffs, even with the port operator, the terminal operator doing their very best and the railroad doing their very best when there's not one voice that command and control and coordination complexities introduce inefficiencies. So I would suggest it's either the government owns it. They don't want to sell it because it's an asset to be used by all modes of transportation, not just Canadian facilities.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of Texas requires investment, requires the combination to have the economics, and to create the scale when you start to do that as the world evolves and as we near shore and we ally shore, those kind of things move the needle. So again, our combination uniquely provides the landscape to create the infrastructure that in partnership. We can't do it alone. We don't own the terminals to load it. We typically will not own the terminal to offload it at Tywater and to load it onto the ships. So it requires a combination and a coordination between the rail the customer and government to be able to make all this happen for our nations.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A potash, you know, Canada, which is Canada's the world's largest producer of potash. We've got Campategs, which is the worldwide exporter of potash. They export potash for nutrient as well as mosaic. You've got K plus S, which is a German producer of potash. And soon have BHP 25, 2026. It's common knowledge that they're building a potash mine in Jansen. So with all that said, all that capacity and all that investment, we need more tide water to export too. So with our network, with this combination, creating a seamless single line move that goes from a potash mine in Saskatchewan all the way to a new terminal that will be developed, in this case port.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have a lot of product that we consume as Americans and as Canadians and as Mexicans that comes into the Florida LA Long Beach. I'll back up a moment for the question you asked me about, you know, how do you plan for these peak grain harvest? Well, it's not just the railroad. We're in partnership with the ports at Tivewater that load that grain in Canada's example to export to feed the world where it does no good to create a whole lot of capacity in the middle if the book cans can't handle it. So partnership with ports, which often are owned by governments, to make sure that they're matching your investment so that your capacity to create matches the capacity that they have at the fort to get it on the ship or get it off the ship. And then going back to investment inland where you create the product. And in this case, I'm going to talk about.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But in turn, that has to be matched to really optimize it with investment that works, requires coordination between governments, as well as with customers. And I'll give you a great one that we're working on now that is being developed as a result of our transaction that's going to be enabled assuming we get this thing approved. And that involves Mexico and it involves the US and it involves Canada. We look at ports. You know, ports have been a very topical. Topic of probably pain and suffering for a lot given the supply chain challenges, West Coast ports.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I definitely think it's not an opportunity. I think it's occurring, and I think it will accelerate when it comes to near showing or the last six months since Russia invaded Ukraine, the topic of ally shoring is just as prominent as an impactful. So I think over the future, that's going to occur. I think that supply chains have never been more important than they are today. I think that partnership between government as well as Customers and industry, and even with each other to invest and to work out best practices. I'll go to our transaction that's very real in these moments. What we are going to create with this extended network that takes out, eliminates handoffs and takes away interchanges and unnecessary work events.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have to make sure that we protect that. But again, there is a limitation. We can't do something that's so unhealthy for the company to satisfy one customer's 10-year or 100-year harvest that puts us out of business that we're not there three or four years from now. In simple terms, I don't want to oversimplify, but in this business, that's kind of what it is. We do our best. We work closely with our customers. We have some search capacity, but there is a limitation on it.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their quantum swing sometimes, but historically and generally they're not. They're within a range. So again, back to my principle, we can never build the railroad free Easter Sunday. I could never build a railroad that says I can handle the 40% peak in one year because the next 10 years I've gone out of business. So what we have to do is keep some surge capacity, and we do. By nature, our railroad, because we operate in Canada winter requires surge capacity as well. You just can't run trains as long and as large as you in the wintertime as you can in the summertime because the mechanical limitations. Air going through a train line. It just physically can't do it. So by nature, we have some latent capacity or surplus that we design. Back to your point about that trade-off between a 50%.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whenever you get two key points, number one, any customer that can give us accurate forecasting as much as they can. The more information we have, the better we can plan the way our models work. But some things like grain, and that's a great example, especially relevant in Canada, there are ebbs and flows. There are peaks and valleys. There's droughts and there's peak harvest. So what we have to do is size our network. We look at five-year averages, three-year averages. You know, the big swings.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tomorrow the next day for my family member for my business commitment, I'll pay a premium to UPS to get it there versus putting a postage stamp on it and opening it gets there in six or seven days. So I likened to try to create that kind of service experience. Some customers aren't willing to pay for that. Some customers only care about price. They think that they're doing their job by getting the lowest freight rate. They don't understand that six months from now, they might have had the lowest rate. But if their product can't get from point A to point B because you've engaged with the railroad that oversails their ability to produce because they've oversold their rail network, then I would suggest after a whole lot of pain and suffering. And maybe if you're a transportation manager, you might have even lost your job over that decision. People understand that you don't have a business if you can't get your product from point A to point B and the railroads dependent upon to get it.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's our service offering. They'll choose me and it'll often pay more for our reliable service than they would. Service provider that's not. And again, I'll use an analogy. This is the way I try to communicate this vision with our team at Canadian Pacific. I compare the service of U.S. Postal versus UPS. If it's my product and it's my letter or it's my package or my gift, that I want to make sure it gets there.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sam, but because we have in a world where capacity has been constrained, customers have not been able to get their products from point A to point B because of the way we run our railroad. We've not been perfect. You're never going to be perfect. But our service experience for our customers is uniquely different than our competitors. And that's kind of the magic recipe. If I go in and tell you I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it. But there's some customers, again, that's called service. That's really what service is. It's not always getting stuff from point A to point B faster than your competitor or faster than a truck. It's about doing what you say you're going to do and being a reliable service provider. So if I go in and tell the customer that.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we start with a common legal understanding in the real industry. We have a common carrier obligation to provide rail service to any customer that comes to us. The negotiation, the terms and the service expectations, it really sort of determines those customer relationships. So I would suggest that if there are no barriers, then cost doesn't matter, service doesn't matter, capacity doesn't matter. We could never walk away. However, you know, there are customers as well that in normal business that quite frankly, I don't want to say they're bad customers, they're just a bad fit. They care more about price than they do service. And that's a value proposition that we pride ourselves on at our railway. We provide a different outcome. We provide a better service. Not because I.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Handle these additional lanes. We need commitment on assets. We need you to build this. We need you to commit that. And in turn, we're willing to match. And that allows us to bespoke our network to grow with our customers in a very unique way. It's not replicable by our competition.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For the fine tooth comb, every OD pair. So every origin destination. So if it's coming into Vancouver and it needs to go to Chicago, if it's coming into Vancouver, it needs to go to Montreal. We pick selectively worked with the customer to customize the lanes that we served, and that's the business that we bid on, and that's the business that we won. So I've not jeopardized my ability to meet any existing commitment. And I've created a superior product that allows this customer to at least sort of de-risk their total business mix not having all of their freight with one provider. They have their freight with us. And the way I see that, not only is it good for us, it's great for them. It's good for long-term relationship because at some point, if I want to spend additional money to handle more of their business in partnership with that customer, I've established trust. And I can say, okay, if you want us to have”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Contract examples. We just recently went through a contract negotiation with a customer that because their current service provider is not providing them an ability to grow in their markets and satisfy their existing customers' needs, they came to us with a big opportunity and they would have loved for us to take all their business. That said, I know my network can't handle all their business and still satisfy all the commitments that we've made to all of our other customers. So we sat down with the customer and said, listen, number one, and I was involved in these discussions, I can't service all your business. I'm just going to set you up to fail and set myself up to fail. However, if there's business lanes that I can help you and you can help me and we have capacity in existing train starts, then I'm more than happy to entertain those lanes. So we literally went through.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Work the meltdown. If I allow my aspirations or eagerness to grow revenue to exceed my ability to be able to produce a product, I not only destroy trust with that particular customer, I destroy my business model. There are many, many cases I could suggest where people lose sight of that and you end up not satisfying anyone or being able to execute for anyone and you fail everyone. And that's not what we're in the business to do. So there's a balance there that has to be pursued and has to be respected.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Existence in a long term. So I think it's important that in your pursuit of efficiency, you understand there's some redundancy built in. You've got to have some, what I call guardrails. You don't want to cut to the bone. There's a tension. And I speak to this as well. There's a constructive tension where if you get beyond it, then you're going to be damaging your ability to produce the product. And that's, again, I liken it to the way we manage our capacity on our network. I get extremely down to the brass tacks involved in large contract negotiations because of scale. It's not because of money. Money matters, obviously, but most importantly, it's because of what the demand to serve the customer will or won't do to my network. I don't want to oversubscribe my network because I understand there's only so much redundancy in the pursuit of efficiency and end up causing the entire network.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there has to be a balance. You can create so much resiliency or redundancy that you go out of business. Think about the church, and Hunter said this to me one day, 20-something years ago, and it resonated with me. He said you can't build a church for Easter Sunday. If you do, you go out of business the other 51 weeks out of the year because you can't pay to sustain it. So you can over. Guest over engineer something, spend more money than is necessary, and the business won't allow you to sustain.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Define what good looks like through the process, measure it because if it matters, you've got to measure it and understand how you're doing reference, what good looks like, and constantly tweaking and refining through processing people to create a better product, create more capacity to create a tighter cost control, to create a better service for the customer. So again, it's a process that never ends. It's a journey. You never really get there. It's just this constant pursuit of operational excellence that allows us to produce what we produce.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have a menu of what I call a shopping list of capital projects that allow us to create more capacity. And every year, you know, based on, and I do it as simple as trade delays and impact to our train velocity and our asset turns, these are the top 10 that cause us the most pain. Well, once you fix those top 10, well, guess what? There's 10 below it to move up. It's a virtuous cycle of continually.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“10, 11,000 of those 13,000 are the men and women that actually do the work day in and day out that are executing those processes. Well, naturally, they're going to trit out. They're going to retire. They're going to leave the industry. So you're always having to retrain. So when you retrain, you have to make sure that training and people develop and is therefore fundamental of being able to sustain your success. I think that's key. And then the process piece. I mean, I look at it something like track capacity. We have a very robust five-year plan, three-year plan, one-year plan, monthly plan. We look at our capacity, our line capacity, and our terminal capacity.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I call it a journey. You've never really arrived. And again, if I stick to the process definition, there are so many processes in running a railway. And I would suggest to running any business. And they're executed by people. So, you really never get to that perfect state where you perfect it every process or you've perfected every human, which is impossible as a side go, but you have people that are trained, giving their best effort. Because in a world like we live in, and I think about CP terms, there are 13,000 employees.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To track infrastructure, to switches and track to facilities. I mean, you get into this virtuous cycle of inefficiency if you don't really right size and optimize your assets. So through that process, again, it's just the right way to run any business. I think you can apply it to any manufacturing business. You could apply it to the airlines. You can apply it to the trucking lines. You can apply it in Simply Plant. Again, it all goes back to. Process refinement and executing what good looks like through people and through culture.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, you're exactly correct. At the end of the day, you're able to do more with less. You're able to run the railway more efficiently. And listen, this is a capital intensive business. I think about, I'll give you a great example. It's CP, when we implemented precision scheduled railroad back in 2012, 2013, we were running with 1,500 locomotives in service a day. Today we're moving more freight with about two-thirds of that, so 1,000 to 1,100. Well, if you think about in simple terms, 500 additional locomotives, well, just in capital expense alone, they cost two to three million dollars a piece. And then you've got to have two or three mechanics per locomotive to maintain them. You've got to have repair parts. And then if you apply that thinking not just to locomotives, but to rail cars.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The process looked like, and then managing to that outcome. And then you end up in our industry, which is heavily capital intensive. You have a great service product that allows People sprayed or customers freight to move from point A to point B efficiently. You move a lot of it back to the skilled question and you do it in a scheduled manner back to the truck like reliability question. That's truly what PSR is.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Precision scheduled railroading. It's an acronym that has been coined by the industry to truly define an operating model that Hunter Harrison, who is a legendary railroader that I had the honor and privilege to mentor me and work with and for over two decades, pioneered in the industry. And essentially, it's a people in process business. And it really is just defining a process for every Process within the movement of freight from point A to point B, and that's the drain movement process, that's the mechanical process, that's the locomotive process. It's defining the process and then applying the right number of people and measures to create a service that your customers won't buy. So it really is, I liken it to lean manufacturing. It's all about define the process, what does good look like, what should”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when you get into the terminals, the terminals receiving or arrival and departure tracks match the siding links. So historically, terminals would have six or seven thousand foot arrival and departure tracks. Well, PSR says that you run bigger trains, but you have to match that with arrival and departure tracks and their terminals that can arrive and depart those trains efficiently, as well as instead of every 10 or 12 miles. The perfect design, or at least in my 30 years of experience doing this, is having a 10 or 12,000 foot siding every 15 miles that allows you the right spacing to be able to sequence strings, run long trains, make train meets, and still be efficient.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's part of it. When I say long, big, and heavy, you know, I've got to be careful in the definition because number one, you have safety limitations. You have technology limitations. And then you've got to make sure you've got the track infrastructure limitation satisfied. So a true PSR railroad, you run fewer trains, which means you have to run longer trains, but you also have to have the infrastructure to be able to accommodate the size of that train. And historically, non-PSR railroads, just traditionally in the industry, until PSR started to evolve, a normal railroad would be built every 10 or 11 miles. You had a $6,000 or $7,000 foot siding. And the sidings for those that don't understand railroading, that's where two trains meet as opposed to having a two-lane road. You have a one-lane road with a siding never 10 or 11 miles so they can pass.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Issues because a passenger train given its nature moving so fast consumes a tremendous amount of capacity because it gets from point A to point B so much faster.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Canadian National Actually in my history. I remember several derivments that I went to and it was created because of a disconnect between the two. You have to super elevate curves. So for a passenger train to go fast around a curve, which the curves are out in the geography, you elevate the outer rail and you drop down the inner rail and it sort of, you know, as inertia carries you around the curve, you use that geometry to be able to accomplish that speed safely for passenger. But if you mix that with a freight train that by nature has to move slower around that curve, you're putting a ton of weight on that low rail. And that low rail effectively will open up the gauge and allow a train to drop in. So there's a balance between the two. And that's the reason a lot of conflict occurs between passenger mixing passenger and freight. You've got to find that balance. Otherwise, there are safety issues, incapacity.”
2022-11-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Keith Creel: Lessons from Life on the Railroad · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT