New Year’s Evolution

Railway Age Editor-in-Chief William C. Vantuono

FROM THE EDITOR, RAILWAY AGE JANUARY 2023 ISSUE: New Year’s resolutions are, mostly, as my late Uncle Alberto used to say, “a bunch of malarkey.” What’s the point in pledging once a year to change something that perhaps you should have changed a long time ago, or in starting to behave differently than what people are accustomed to, on Jan. 1, year after year? The only constant in life is change, right? And if you really think about it, life is more about adapting than about changing.

So is railroading, which Katie Farmer, our 2023 Railroader of the Year, calls “a momentum business.” Keeping the momentum going involves adaptation. Perhaps a better word is “evolution,” something the rail industry, both management and labor, needs to wholly embrace. 

Railroading as a momentum business “applies more broadly to the whole supply chain,” Katie told me in our interview for this month’s cover story. “When one part of the supply chain struggles, we all struggle. When volume fluctuates, we adapt to that variability, and that’s not new for us. The difference is the pandemic impacted the entire global supply chain, which, as you know, is a complex system of connections among ports, railroads, trucks and our customers.”

Moving through the pandemic, BNSF “saw consumers shift from services to goods, more freight went into the supply chain,” Katie noted. “Unfortunately, labor left the workforce, and it did create a series of disruptions. It created a series of shortages—chassis drivers, labor to support distribution center unloading. All of this slowed overall velocity. That caused shipments to back up in rail facilities and at the ports. … We have strong momentum in restoring the service customers have come to expect and that we frankly expect from ourselves. There are, however, some good things that have come out of the supply chain challenges. There is increased collaboration, information sharing and accountability across the supply chain. But there is more to be done. The supply chain continues to evolve. We have to evolve as an industry in order to remain competitive. It’s imperative that we find ways to continue to collaborate and work more closely, not only across the supply chain, but also with our customers.”

In my humble opinion, the evolution Katie refers to involves “creative destruction,” defined as “the dismantling of established practices to make way for innovation and improved production. It is most often used to describe disruptive technologies.”

Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the term in 1942. He characterized creative destruction as “the process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.”

In the 19th century, the railroads were the biggest form of creative destruction. In the 21st century, creative destruction is driven largely by disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning, made possible by microprocessors infinitely more powerful than the room-sized mainframes that got us to the moon in 1969.   

Another thing about evolution: It’s difficult, even painful—but well worth the effort. Realistically, we have very little choice. So let’s all make adaptation our New Year’s evolution—but not just one day a year.