THE MAINTENANCE RACE

THE MAINTENANCE RACE

Sometimes maintenance involves shooting the shark.

The story of three sailors competing to be the first to solo-sail around the world and their approach to maintenance which led to three very different outcomes.

tldr - in 1968, a race was held to sail around the world on a sailboat, by oneself, without stopping. The three sailors highlighted in this article had three different approaches to maintenance - one fixed things as they came up, another placed (too much) faith in technology and did not consider maintenance, and the last did maintenance pre-emptively and ahead of time.

I won't spoil the ending but highly recommend reading the piece in full (set aside some time as it's a long article).

Replace "maintenance" with "organization" and it becomes easy to draw parallels to knowledge management. You don't want to think about maintenance when you are caught by an 80 foot wave deep in the pacific ocean - rather it's something you want to constantly be doing so it becomes easy to weather the storm. Be diligent about maintenance and nothing can stop you.


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