Breaking the Land Speed Record

ladies and gentlemen

thank you for inviting me to tedx it’s

my great pleasure to give you this

presentation

which i hope you’ll very much enjoy you

know we live in difficult times right

now we’ve lost a lot of really good

friends due to curvied

and i hope we’ll all learn important

lessons from this terrible experience

our countries have been forced to invest

very large sums

to support our people and our companies

uh throughout the pandemic and in the uk

we borrowed almost

our total gdp in value

so we all now need to make that capital

back again and of course this means

innovation

on a grand scale we all need global

innovation and we need

change right now we can’t make that sort

of money back again by just doing the

same things

and raising the prices that leads to

dangerous inflation

so to study this you have to read up

about the germans

and the weimar republic the hyper

inflation then back in the 1920s

as they tried to recover after the shock

of world war one

so we need to innovate and it’s a

difficult subject

the ideas have to be really good and

original ones and they need

solid industrial support they have to be

innovations you can use right

now and you need to forget the blue sky

thinking

in the past in the uk we’ve had we’ve

seen serious

resistance of change but now long last

we’ve seen movement

there is now growth in the electric car

market and the early start of the

hydrogen and fuel cell cars as well

and people are getting used to exchange

they’re asking questions and beginning

to expect change

which is of course really healthy and so

very very important

we specialize in world land speed record

breaking

and to break a world record you have to

achieve a greater performance

than has ever ever been achieved before

and with our car thrust ssc

we broke the sun barrier way back in

just have a look at this

[Music]

i would say that was fast

450 shoot one yes we got it

everything is

[Music]

with a world record breaker you have to

achieve the greatest performance ever

and to do that we have to innovate on a

massive scale

and with so many innovations in one

project we’re into

what we call compound innovation the

thruster seat car

featured twin after burning bypass

engines supersonic aerodynamics

and rear wheel steer nothing like

prosthesis

had ever been done before and today the

record still stands 23 years later

it’s going to take a very innovative

challenger to beat it

so you need a special sort of

organization to innovate

everyone needs to be focused on the

objective and they need to be

innovators and prepared to take real

risk and that also includes the backers

as well they’ve got to take risk

the company’s structure needs to be flat

and everyone has to have both

clearly identified responsibilities and

the authority to carry them out

organizations which are command and

control generally have little innovation

and capability

because their team people are not

encouraged to think out of the box

uh when studying uh management please

take time to study the work of

the lady abraham maslow and his

hierarchy of needs of 1941.

people work best when they’re highly

motivated and you have to create an

organization

that gives your people the opportunity

to find out

who they are and what they’re really

capable of achieving in their life

mazda understood all this and back in

1941 and you need to

study self-actualization now that’s the

big

motivator people working in traditional

command and control

organizations have the comfort of

stability regular money and they’re

asked to do what the company wants them

to do

but they may finish their careers never

ever understanding what they were really

capable of achieving

because that company never gave them the

opportunity

when i last gave a presentation in india

we were deeply involved in a thousand

mile an hour bloodhound project

which we lost in 2017 when the british

government

failed us on a great major grant

application

at the start of that project we were

invited by the british military

to run the project as an education

program

uh to increase stem take-up and from

this we learned

that we’re much better a much better

ways of developing education

we need to move away from learning by

rote to learning by

understanding and the key to education

inspiring it’s inspiration

before long we were sharing the

bloodhound project

with a hundred and twenty thousand

school children every year

and in 1997 we ran the bloodhound at uk

airport

with an audience of three thousand

children now just have a look at this

this is just so powerful and it’s

inspired a huge new generation of

scientists and engineers in britain

it’s going to be really nice to share

our excitement

that we’ve had over the last three weeks

with the general public i think they’re

i think they’re going to be blown away

[Music]

this is the fastest racing car on earth

and it feels like it

[Music]

wow

um i like it because it’s really funny

you get to learn like

lots of things that are really

scientific

[Music]

i’ve absolutely loved it today it’s just

amazing

seeing the car finally run

[Music]

i hope you enjoy this and please keep a

lookout for our next project in 2022

keep safe keep well see you all again

and i thank

you