Broken Toilets And Bullet Trains

摘要

Akio Shiibashi had wanted to design bullet trains in his native Japan. Instead, the railway he worked for sent him to repair toilets and light fixtures around a few of its stations in Tokyo. He spent weeks cursing his bad luck. He felt he was on the wrong career track and at times wondered what the mechanical engineering degree he'd earned 11 years earlier was worth. Then he started to see the value of fixing toilets and light fixtures. Unlike his previous job with the railway, repairing trains, this one put him closer to customers, the passengers. He met Shigeo Miki, who had been working years in the laboratory to develop a contactless fare card, with the help of Sony Corp. Miki had tried unsuccessfully to get the railway to foot the massive bill for the project. He turned to Shiibashi to sell the idea to top managers. Shiibashi convinced the railway to spend an extra 13 billon yen (US$107 million) on contactless using an appeal he hadlearned fixing the toilets and light fixtures: The company could save money while improving customer service. He showed the railway it could recover the extra money on lower maintenance costs by moving to contactless. Shiibashi went on to build the Suica contactless ticketing system for East Japan Railway, today considered the world's largest at 8 million transactions per day.