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Malcolm McLean

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2019-02-25
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2019-02-25
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  1. After posting a $62 million profit in 1984, McLean Industries reported a $67 million loss in 1985. So think about that. That's what, $129,000 swing or whatever that 125, whatever the number is, that's a hell of a making $62 million one year and then losing $67 million next year. It gets worse. That was in 84 and 85. Now, what happens in 1986? In the first nine months of 1986, McLean Industries lost 237 million dollars. Staggering under $1.2 million of debt, McLean Industry suspended all service and filed for bankruptcy. Malcolm never got over the US line's bankruptcy. He went into seclusion, shunning journalists and avoiding public appearances. His failure followed him. The knowledge that he had hurt thousands of people, a constant source of shame.

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. McLean had no difficulty raising the money. The world was eager to invest with the founder of a container shipping, the founder of container shipping as he turned United States lines, which is his new business, into a global bus service. And that's how he described it. It's a global bus service. Now here's the problem. This makes me sad. Disaster was not long in coming. Instead of rising from $28 to $50 a barrel, as McLean had expected, oil prices collapsed to fourteen dollars. This is in 1985. He's in his 70s at the time. Maybe 60s. United States line slow fuel-conserving ships were suddenly the wrong vessel for the market. And the oil sheikhdoms of the Middle East could no longer afford the limitless quantities of imports that were supposed to keep the econ ships filled with cargo.

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. On something that's outside your control. That's not smart It says McLean had learned from his mistakes with the speedy SL7s, whose fuel bills ate up their profits. So he's like, okay, I'm not going to make that mistake again, right? The new ships were built for an era of expensive oil. So he's like, I'm going to build ships that go slower so that oil costs are expensive. I'll be okay. They would conserve fuel by sailing at only $18 knots, taking longer than Evergreen's vessels to sail around the world. McLean dubbed his new vessels econ ships because their fuel economy, along with the scale economies created by their enormous size, would produce the lowest cost pertainer ship anywhere. So they're bigger and they move slower and therefore they can ship things for lower than their competitors. Here's the problem. The ships alone cost $570 million.

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. Okay, so here's his downfall. Remember, I said frugality yes, leverage no. So he has this idea he's going to say, hey, I'm going to do him and this other guy named, he's competing with this other guy named, let's see, Chang Young Fane, who owned this company called Evergreen, and they decide, they both decide that they're going to do, instead of what was common, like you'd have boats in the Atlantic or boats in the Pacific, he's like, my boats are going to, both of them said they're just going to do around the world trips. That's the new thing. And so it says McLean's strategy was different from Chang's. His ships would circle the globe only in an eastbound direction, and they would do so slowly. Now here's what I mean about misapplying the lesson, right? Especially when you think some of these things are out of your control. The price of oil is always outside of your control. Don't lever yourself up and then be dependent.

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. And then he starts another one. So he buys to the surprise of almost everyone, he arranged to buy United States lines. And this is going to end in tragedy. So we got to the part of the book where we stopped learning what to do from Malcolm. We learn what not to do. And I just think this is a very common set of emotions for entrepreneurs, builders. And I think the solution is just keep your company. I mean, there's some cases you have to sell, or whatever the case is, maybe you accidentally started a company, but if you're like a builder at heart, you're not going to be happy just sitting on your ass with a bunch of money in the bank, you know. They're just not going to happen.

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. Which we hear a lot. He's bored. He's looking for something to do. And he wants to try again. So I think this is an interesting, what's a dichotomy of entrepreneurship where you have a lot of people that like, oh, like the exit for them is what they think is what they want. And then when it happens, they regret it. They're like, damn it, now I'm sitting here. Like, if you're an entrepreneur, that means you're a builder. You have to do something. The idea that you can just make a ton of money and be content sitting down, we know for fact that's not true because we have lit, like an entire roster of history to see this happens over and over again. And undoubtedly what these people do is they try to start another company. But usually they already had their best idea. They should have stuck with their best idea because the best things in life come from compounding, right? For sticking with that idea for a long period of time. And so what does he do? He sells his company, right?

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. Okay, so what happens here though, right? So, this guy's now, he's not a spring chicken anymore. He's rather old. And, you know, for somebody that started working at the beginning of depression, now we're in 1977. So he sells his company, makes a ton of money, obviously Regrets

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. They're ships. The costliest merchant ships ever built were also the 30th, each burning 500 tons of fuel per day. At full speed, they consumed three times as much fuel per container as a competitor's vessels. When the price of bunker fuel jumped from $22 per ton to $70 within a matter of months, the SL7s became a crushing burden. So he was optimizing for speed. What happens when you go faster? Well, it consumes a lot more fuel. And if that fuel cost goes up, you're screwed, right? So, a settling of scores was inevitable. McLean, unhappy with Reynolds's bureaucratic ways, began selling his stock in nineteen seventy five and left the board in nineteen seventy seven.

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. With RJ Reynolds, and he's still running the company, but they own it, and that's not gonna work out for somebody like him. But this is an important part because it's somebody said the hard part of entrepreneurship is not only, like, it's when you're hearing advice, it's like you have to figure out who to listen to and when. So some advice is good, but it's not always good at the right time. Like it's dynamic, right? It changes. Well, this is a crazy thing because here you see Malcolm learn something and then in a few minutes you're going to realize that that learning was accurate for the time that he learned it, but it was no longer accurate for the time he was applying the oge, if that makes sense. It says Malcolm McLean, acting per usual on intuition rather than caution analysis, had overridden objections from Sealand's board to move ahead with the SL7 in 1968. So remember SL7.

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. No conglomerate chieftain was a more avid reader of financial reports than Malcolm McLean. He knew what the cost of competition was going to be, and he knew that Seeland, its balance sheet stretched almost to the limit, had no hope of borrowing money. McLean turned toward an entirely unexpected source of funds RJ Reynolds. This is the cigarette company. Its cigarette business threw off cash by the bucketful, and its managers were using that cash to turn the company into conglomerate. So this time there's a lot of regulation coming down for cigarette companies, including their inability to advertise, so they're trying to diversify into other businesses. Reynolds offered $530 million from McLean's company.

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. To solidify the entire solution the customer needs. The problem was you had people went crazy and they started lobbying against it. They had the ICC turn them down, all these other different people basically say you can't, one company can't own everything. I guess they were, I mean, they do have somewhat of an argument that, you know, kind of monopolizing it, but in any case. So this is what happens if you wait too long, but just a reminder, it's only too late if you copy.

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. Before this, the projection, like, yeah, it's going to get there 40, 40 days, maybe 90 days later. They don't know because there was no one company taking care of that freight from beginning to end. They would have to interact and interchange with all these different companies. And then sometimes you'd have like a strike or there'd be like a fire or there'd be all kinds of different things that are outside of the control and you'd have to wait for another company to fix. So this is Malcolm trying to...

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. Trains, David, come on. He'd own the railroad yards. He'd own the containers and he'd owned the trucks. So then the Pennsylvania Railroad would pull McLean's all-container train straight to a rail yard that he would own, which would then pull it to a dock which he would build and arriving to meet a Europe-bound ship, which he would own, which would in turn connect with trucks and trains on a European dock. And this is the end result. That was really confusing. I'm sorry if I'm supposed to be simplifying things for you, and I'm confusing myself and probably you. Okay, so this is the end result, the most important part. For the first time, a shipper, a thousand miles from sea, would be able to buy not just international transportation, but tightly scheduled international transportation. A seller could tell its customers when the goods were to arrive with a reasonable likelihood that the schedule would be met. So we're talking about there.

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. Kind of just focuses on that. And this is his integrated solution that he proposed the railroad part of this. Well, let me just read this to you. So his idea was McLean Industry is offered an audacious proposal to build railroad yards in Chicago and St. Louis at its own expense. Freight forwarders owned by McLean Industries would collect freight from shippers, consolidated into McLean-owned containers, and load the containers aboard McLean-owned rail cars. He wants to control the entire, like give them one unified solution. And this is why. It would also contain the only way to own the shippers. I can't speak. He owned the ships. He own the railroads. He'd own the railway, what are they called? Rail cars?

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. Okay, so this is just another straightforward understanding of what McLean's vision on how things should be based on the customer's actual problem. Malcolm McLean had a different vision for him in the same business moving freight.

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. Of the war were eligible for cheap government loans to set themselves up as independent truckers. So McLean encouraged veterans to become owner operators, brought them together, what that means is they drive the truck and they own the truck that they drive. I know a little bit about this because my dad's truck driver brought them together to purchase equipment in a single large order and sign them to haul freight from a clean trucking. So he's kind of like the Uber of trucking. But with military veterans financed by the US government, no app. So he's getting the business, but they own the rigs that they're driving and they're doing all the driving. All right, so he brings them together. They purchase equipment in single large order. So they have some benefits and efficiencies there and then sign them to haul free from a clean trucking. So very similar. Okay, so this is really important.

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. War left many truck lines struggling. Remember just still in the 1940s here. And McLean repeatedly seized opportunities. Between 1946 and 1954, McLean trucking bought or leased routes in at least 10 different transactions, expanding its network from Atlanta to Boston. The company added six hundred trucks between nineteen forty seven and nineteen forty nine. That's crazy. Using the government as the unwitting financier. Oh, so this is a really interesting idea. Check this out. This is how he was able to get all those trucks in so fast and have the U.S. government foot the bill.

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. For businesses that want to ship things just because you want to protect the railroad industry. More than anything else, the ICC wanted to keep the transportation industry stable. So there's this present behavior by humans throughout history of this idea of artificial control over the economy, over businesses, this idea that you can somehow keep things stable, which I think is, you know, probably false regulation damped competitive spirit in the trucking industry. Showing the sort of ingenuity that would characterize his career, McLean found ways around the regulatory regulator's obstacles. If winning new route authority was too arduous, why not buy a carrier that already had attractive routes? And if buying another truck line was too expensive, why not lease one? The labor unrest that followed

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. Okay, so now his business is up and running. This is how he got around what he would consider corrupt regulation. So there's this, it might still be around today, but his industry trucking industry at the time was regulated by the ICC, which is the Interstate Commerce Commission. And there's some very strange objectives for the ICC. So let me start there. The ICC's concern was not efficiency, but order. Regulation protected the interest of established truck lines, also known as regulatory capture, still happens today, by limiting competition and is protected the railroads by forcing truck lines to charge much more than railroad companies. So again, very bizarre, right? Not really serving the interest of the consumers. Like, why would you keep artificially high? You're keeping artificially high prices.

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. Talking about 11, now we're going to go into 1946, so it's 12 years later. It says revenues in 1946 were 2.2 million, nearly 10 times the level of 1940. McLean already wealthy at age 34, viewed this just the beginning. As he wrote a few years later, I saw that my only opportunity was to build and build and build, to make a big trucking company out of a relatively small one.

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. and had already hauled steel drums from North Carolina to New Jersey and cotton yarns to mills in New England. By nineteen forty, so now he'd be twenty seven at the time, as preparation for war revived the economy, the six year old McLean trucking owned 30 trucks and grossed two hundred thirty thousand dollars. That's in 1940. McLean built his operation during the war, gaining additional routes. A massive merger among seven of his competitors, which he opposed unsuccessfully all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, barely affected the truck line. At the war's end in 1945, World War II, Malcolm McLean controlled a thriving business with 162 trucks, mainly hauling textiles and cigarettes from North Carolina to Philadelphia, New York, and southern New England. What was that, 1934?

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. Transport business, right? According to a much repeated tale, one trip found McLean so poor that he couldn't afford to pay the toll at a bridge along the way. He left a wrench with the toll collector as a deposit, redeeming it after selling his load in New York City. So what do they mean? One centist are telling you he's making enough money to buy trucks. The next centist are telling you he's too poor to pay toll. Welcome to Malcolm McLean's modus operandi of pushing it to the limit. Again, it gets him in trouble later on in life. The rags to richest tail fails to do justice to McLean's immense ambition. By 1935, at 22 years of age in which just one year of experience as a trucker, McLean owned two trucks and one tractor trailer. He employed, so let me, so he's 22, and he's only been open for one year, right? So he's got two trucks, one tractor trailer, and nine drivers who own their own race.

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. McLean proposed to do it himself. The station owner let him use an old trailer that had been rusting in the yard. McLean Trucking Company opened for business in march nineteen thirty four with McLean still running the service station as the sole driver. And so look, check that out. So he graduates in nineteen thirty one three years later. He already has his own company. So he's a very, very driven person it's going to see. And unfortunately, some of that drive winds up leading to a downfall later in life. Okay, so it says a local man agreed to sell McLean and used dump truck on installments of $3 a week. With that truck, McLean won a contract to haul dirt for a federal public works program. Even after hiring a driver, McLean earned enough money earned enough to buy a new truck to haul vegetables from local farms. So he's going to basically do everything, start out doing gas, I'll take your dirt, I'll take your vegetables.

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. Upon Malcolm's graduation from high school in 1931 in the depths of the Great Depression, family ties got him work stocking shelves at a local grocery store. And then he starts working, this is how he's going to stumble into business. Those local connections, what they're talking about here are family connections. It's not like high socioeconomic status connections. It's that like such a small town that everybody was related. So it says those local connections helped once more when an oil company needed a gas station manager, a family friend. So he starts working at a gas station manager. And then he realizes that he can make money just trucking gasoline for the company instead of working in the store. So this is a family friend lent McLean the money to buy his first load of gasoline. His rise began when he learned that a trucker earned $5 for bringing the station's oil from Fayetteville, which was 28 miles away.

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. Reshaping the business of shipping was left to an outsider with no maritime experience. A self-made trucking magnet named Malcolm McLean. McLean was born in nineteen thirteen, deep in the swamp country of southeastern North Carolina. At the time of McLean's birth, about three thousand residents called Maxton, so they had about 3,500 residents, and it was very rural and very poor.

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. Okay, so these ideas were out there. Malcolm's the first one to integrate them all into one solution. So just describing what this is author just with one sentence describing what everybody was trying to solve, all of these undertakings were modest in scope, but all of them had the same aim to cut the cost of moving cargo through slow and inefficient ports. By the early 1950s, there was little dispute that freight terminals were a transportation chokehold, and So there's just going to be a lot of stuff to be impossible for me to share in the podcast because this book is so long. But what they're talking about, chokeholds, it's not only where their processes are inefficient, but there was a bunch of competing interest and a bunch of...

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. So instead of unloading, shifting, and reloading boxes of loose items, why not put the freight into big boxes and just move the boxes? The concept of shifting freight in large boxes had been around for decades. The British and French railways tried wooden containers to move household furniture in the late 19th century, using cranes to transfer the boxes from rail flat cars to horse carts. Oh my goodness. At the end of World War I, almost as soon as motorized trucks came into wide civilian use, the Cincinnati Motor Terminal Company hit upon the idea of interchangeable truck bodies that were lifted onto and off of wheels with a crane. Farsighted thinkers were already proposing a standardized unit container in the form of a demountable closed auto truck body, so kind of closed, which can be readily transferred by cranes between railroads, flat cars, auto chassis, warehouse floors, and vessels.

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. Part about like this was a this was a giant opportunity hidden hidden plain sight the solution to the high cost of freight handling was obvious instead of loading unloading shifting and reloading thousands of loose items which is exactly what they were doing at the time which is why you had so many like manpower to do this which now in the world we live in you know we most of the people probably listening to my voice were born after the containerization Like it just seems so bizarre that they would do stuff like this. Like this seems very wasteful. Like you're you just put a bunch of random stuff in a box and then you ship it and then on the other end you have 20 30 50 100 people going and using muscle power to take this out and you wonder why it's so inefficient so it says um

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. Founders episode such precision unimaginable before the container had led to massive reductions in manufacturers' inventories and correspondingly huge cost savings, which I just touched on a little bit there.

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. It saved time. And that's really hard to put a value on that because it's priceless. It's literally the only currency that humans have that is non-renewable. Quicker, handling and less time in storage translated to faster transit from manufacturer to customer, reducing the cost of financing inventories that were sitting unproductively on railway sidings or in pierside warehouses awaiting a ship. The container combined with the computer made it practical for companies like Toyota and Honda to develop just-in-time manufacturing in which a supplier makes the goods its customer wants only as the customer needs them and then ships them in containers to arrive at a specified time. I just found a book written by the founder of Honda. It's like 30 years old, maybe 35 years old. So I'm waiting for it to arrive. But eventually that's going to be a future.

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. Building something one place and then having to move that elsewhere, whether it's a short term across town or across the entire globe. So applying efficiencies to such a massive industry, which is basically what at the heart of what McLean did, not only did it make him a very wealthy man, but similar to when we were studying John Bogle a few weeks ago, what did we learn in one of John Bogle's books is that the estimates of him passing on the savings from index funds to the investors, his career contributed to about $250 billion, about a quarter trillion dollars of savings. So who knows what that number is with now we're going, what, 70 years of containerization? It's probably much larger in McLean's case. But at the core, it's transportation efficiency. So that's what we're going to talk about here. Transport efficiencies, though, hardly begin to capture the economic impact of containerization. The container not only lowered freight bills,

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. You can't stop it once it starts. So saying, you know, they don't want to disturb the profits. Well, the profits got disturbed. They don't want to disturb the jobs. The jobs got disturbed. And the social arrangements tied to those jobs and profits certainly got disturbed after this. Okay. Even seemingly simple matters such as the design of the steel fitting that allows almost any crane in any port to lift almost any container were settled only after years of contention. In the end, it took a major war. The United States painful campaign in Vietnam to prove the merit of this revolutionary approach to moving freights. Okay, so now at the core of why this was necessary is think about how much of our economy relies on

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  33. Would prove a passing fad. We've seen that before governments reacted with confusion trying to figure out how to capture its benefits without disturbing its profits, jobs, and social arrangements that were tied to the status quo. You know, I'm probably going to mention this multiple times on the podcast. There's so many times when I'm reading this book and we could change out containerization with the internet and the exact same behavior by governments, by powerful leaders, by entrenched incumbents. It's the same behavior over and over again. And I just kept getting slapped in the face with that thought as I started reading this book. It just says, you know, governments reacted with confusion, trying to figure out how to capture its benefits without disturbing the profits, jobs, and social arrangements that retired to the status quo. Problem is when you have fundamental changes in technology, as we've seen in the past, you can't.

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. Change. We need to embrace that. But as we know, we've now talked about 60 something, all different industries, all through different times of period, human nature is resistant to train, change, especially when your paycheck depends on it. Okay, so it says that first container voyage of 1956, an idea turned into reality by the ceaseless drive of an entrepreneur who knew nothing about ships unleashed more than a decade of battle around the world. Many titans of the transportation industry sought to stifle the container. Powerful labor leaders pulled out all the stops to block its ascent, triggering strikes in dozens of harbors as an entire chapter dedicated to that. It's some really silly behavior. Some ports spent heavily to promote it, while others spent huge sums for traditional piers and warehouses in the vain hope that the contained

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. So 58. And now they're saying millions, tens of millions of boxes each year. Okay, both the containers, promoters, and its opponents sensed from the very beginning that this was an invention that could change the way the world works. It's kind of. So I'm reading from the introduction. Later on in the book, though, it becomes apparent a lot of people dug their heads in the sand. And the reason I think I'll talk about it on the podcast, but just in case I don't, it took an outsider. Malcolm Clean was not in the shipping industry. He was in the trucking industry. That's how he got a start. So everybody in the shipping industry was very hesitant once the technology was appeared and I'll go into detail like how once you see something, I think it was like an order of 10 times cheaper to ship things just by using Malcolm's system that it kind of slaps you in the face like, oh, okay, the world is.

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. Malcolm McLean, including how he started, how he thinks about business, things that are important to us. So that's what I'm going to be focusing on today. And so let me just jump into getting right back into this whole ship, the very first ship that used containers in this way, which is the ideal X, the one I was just referencing. So it says getting from the ideal X to a system that moves tens of millions of boxes each year was not an easy voyage. So let me just stop there right off that. That sentence. So, again, big things start small. The very first inkling of the containerization industry, which

    2019-02-25 · Founders · #61 Malcom McLean: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source