The rugged tablet has evolved

The rugged tablet has evolved

This week we announced the successor to our best ever selling, fully rugged tablet with the introduction of the TOUGHBOOK G2. Someone asked me what was better about the new device and I was about to leap into all the various fantastic enhancements when I was reminded of the parallels with a remarkable cycling success story and the philosophy of “the aggregation of marginal gains.”

It’s the philosophy of searching for a tiny margin of improvement in everything you do and in sport it was made famous by Dave Brailsford, when he was hired as the new performance coach for British Cycling in the pursuit of more success. And boy, did he have a challenge on his hands. In almost 100 years, since 1908, no British cyclist had won a single Olympic medal. In fact, the performance of British riders had been so underwhelming that it was rumoured that a top bike manufacturer in Europe refused to sell bikes to the team because they were afraid that it would hurt sales if other professionals saw them using their equipment.

But Brailsford’s principle was simple yet revolutionary; break down everything you can think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by one percent. Then see the significant increase when you put them all together.

In the cycling team, they redesigned the bike seats to make them more comfortable and rubbed alcohol on the tires for better grip. The riders wore electrically heated overshorts to keep their muscles at the ideal temperature and created more aerodynamic racing suits. Each change had a tiny benefit but the total accumulation was history changing. Just five years after Brailsford took over, the British Cycling team dominated the road and track cycling events at the Olympic Games in Beijing, where they won an astounding 60 percent of the gold medals available. Four years later, they raised the bar again as they set nine Olympic records and seven world records.