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
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i would say that was fast
450 shoot one yes we got it
everything is
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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
is
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
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uh
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this is the fastest racing car on earth
and it feels like it
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wow
um i like it because it’s really funny
you get to learn like
lots of things that are really
scientific
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so
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i’ve absolutely loved it today it’s just
amazing
seeing the car finally run
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oh
uh
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