Point to a spot in the Philippines. Any spot. Chances are, within 100 kilometers, there's a cycling club close by or the area is a route or destination for cyclists. The weather and ambiance are so enjoyable to cycling that the enthusiasm has not waned since it bloomed during the latter part of the 20th Century.
Every cyclist knows every little bit helps to boost performance. Such is the story of the British Cycling team in 2003. The last time Great Britain won a gold medal at the Olympic Games was in 1908. In the Tour de France, the English were looking at 110 years of win-less performance. That all changed in starting 2003.
Great Britain's governing body for professional cycling hired Dave Brailsford as its new performance director. Brailsford had a strategy, the aggregation of marginal gains. This was a philosophy of searching for a tiny margin of improvement in everything you do. Brailsford said, “The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.”
improve it by 1 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.
Bailsford and his staff made small improvements: changed bike seats, rubbed alcohol on tires for better grip, used fabrics with better wind tunnel aerodynamic profiles, etc. And drove deeper into it with massage gels that led to faster muscle recovery. They even hired a surgeon to teach riders how to wash their hands to reduce viral infection, 17 years before Covid.-19.
Hundreds of these micro improvements summed up into dramatic results. In the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the British Cycling team dominated the road and track cycling events. They won 60 percent of the gold medals available. Four years later, in the London Olympic games, they set nine Olympic records and seven world records.
In 2012, Bradley Wiggins became the first British cyclist to win the Tour de France, followed by his teammate, Chris Froome, the succeeding year. Froome would win again in 2015, 2016 and 2017.
This is the power of tiny gains. Accumulate small improvements relentlessly in your business, factory or operations.
Huskey's Specialty Lubricants enable these improvements for you, in some cases, with dramatic improvements that deliver astounding results over time. Similar to Brailsford, coordinate adjustments across the overall process. For example, the Dyna-Mite Red Grease, a unique high-temperature, extreme pressure, non-melting premium grease, reduces the number of lubricants you keep on hand, while improving equipment performance, enabling you to revise your lube application and maintenance schedule accordingly. Thus freeing your manpower to perform other value-added tasks.