From Covered Wagons to Boeing 787 or....From Telegraphy to Skype

About a hundred years ago, the little boy that would one day be my maternal grandfather traveled across Texas in wagon trains with his family. Each stop in a town along the way gave him a chance to go over the Western Union office and watch the telegraphers at work. He was driven, I believe, by the same curiosity we have today when we open up our FaceBook page or when we use other social media to connect with one another.
Imagine how amazing it must have seemed to that young boy that with the right codes (morse) and finger movements, one could connect with people all around the country. Not much as changed really, just telegraphy on steroids. Today we use the right codes (the alphabet) and finger movements (typing/texting) to communicate with people all over the world. It was telegraphy then, today it is Skype!


So with all this new ability to communicate, comes a new ability to collaborate in ways that even the authors of Wikipedia hadn't dreamed of. The book discusses the success of the global plant floor operation that produced the Boeing 787 and how it could never have been possible without culture-changing collaboration among Boeing's business partners and suppliers. 


Think today, just a few years later, we have all types of on-line collaboration tools that are free and open to public use. Applications like Google Docs will change the way I do business in terms of collaborating with my clients. 


And then I think of the collaboration involved in a "successful" wagon train, and I realize, that from  the covered wagon to the Boeing 787, not nearly  as much has changed as we may think!