All The Small Things

In his biography of John D. Rockefeller, Ron Chernow wrote:

Rockefeller was relentless in ferreting out ways to cut costs. During an inspection tour of a Standard Oil plant in New York City, for instance, he observed a machine that soldered the lids on five-gallon cans of kerosene destined for export. Upon learning that each lid was sealed with 40 drops of solder, he asked, “Have you ever tried 38?” It turned out that when 38 drops were applied, a small percentage of the cans leaked. None leaked with 39, though. “That one drop of solder”, said Rockefeller, “saved $2,500 the first year; but the export business kept on increasing after that and doubled, quadrupled–became immensely greater than it was then; and the saving has gone steadily along, one drop on each can, and has amounted since to many hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

This anecdote has always stuck with me as an example of how easy it is to overlook small improvements that can add up over time. We always want to look for something big to do. As a culture, we’re focused on splashy announcements, we give prizes for ‘big discoveries’, and we make lists of the ‘top ten innovations’. Yet when added up, while Rockefeller was in charge of Standard Oil, he cut the cost of producing refined oil almost in half. This was not the result of any one big change, but rather all these small improvements combined.

Consider the ubiquitous lithium-ion battery. It’s one of the most important inventions of our time, directly responsible for the rise of smartphones and electric vehicles. In 2019 three of the key people behind it won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Yet this ignores quite a bit of history. The first commercial lithium-ion batteries were very expensive and had low energy density. Since 1991 cost per energy capacity declined 13% per year, leading to an overall incredible 97% decrease. Suffice to say, all the modern uses of batteries wouldn’t be anywhere close to possible if the tech was stuck at 1991 levels. These improvements were done gradually by many thousands of people, making lots of small incremental changes. They are much less heralded but arguably even more important than the original discoverers (how many discoveries amount to nothing because they can’t actually be scaled?). 

I’ve seen this pattern in software as well. It’s common that small improvements get ignored or forgotten. Hundreds of potential bug fixes sit on some backlog. Many small performance improvements are seen as not worth the time. Instead, everyone focuses on building a totally new product, or doing some giant rewrite. Rather than iterating on an existing process, it’s tempting to throw everything out and adopt a “new paradigm”. Yet the combination of fixing those many small issues can add up to something quite large. Software that is too buggy or too slow might push away customers. That isn’t to say that we should exclusively focus on small things. As with anything, there is a balance to be had. But right now I think we’re focused too much on glorifying the big changes and ignoring the small. Let’s try to move somewhat in the other direction.

In conclusion:

Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence.
– Ovid