The Culture of Precision Railroading
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter discusses the three foundational concepts used to change the corporate culture in Canadian National Railways (CN). When understanding of and commitment to success in the Five Guiding Principles was spreading, it was time to assess the current culture and determine what future culture was needed to support continuous improvement. E. Hunter Harrison studied how to achieve this culture change with two of his leaders, Les Dakens, who was Senior Vice President, People at the time, and Peter Edwards, who was head of Organization Development. To build a true performance-oriented culture, they quickly settled on three foundational concepts that had underpinned success so far. One of the concepts is “The Organizational Culture Continuum,” which views organizations in five levels, from “out of control” to fully “engaged.” Another concept is “The Spectrum of Employee Engagement” which shows how employees vary in their degree of engagement. The third concept is “Washing out the mud in the middle” where “mud,” refers to the bureaucracy, silos, poor communications, and disconnects that muddy the processes and workflow between top leaders and the front line.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".