White Line Fever
Ramesh Srinivasan
Leadership Coach, Keynote Speaker, Leadership Development, Sales Trainer, Key Account Management, Technology Product Mgmt Consultant
Glenn McGrath defines White Line Fever as the transition from beauty to beast the minute his teammates cross the boundary line and come on to the field. This was part of the Australian cricket team’s ‘win at all costs’ approach to the game, not so long ago. In Australia, this meaning of White Line Fever (as crossing the line) holds true for all sports.
However, in psychology, this term originated to describe a highway hypnosis:
“A light hypnotic state induced by the monotony of driving a motor vehicle, usually on long, straight roads uninterrupted by crossings, municipalities or other visually distracting factors; it most commonly occurs in a background of fatigue.”
Arguably, the greatest post-World War II technological development on the roads of US, was the arrival of air-conditioned cars. By the mid-50s, it was a ‘must-have’. By the mid-60s, even large trucks were refrigerated, thus facilitating produce from distant parts of the US being available almost immediately in stores and markets across the States.
This gave a huge fillip to the trucking industry in the US and led to truck driving becoming one of the more coveted career options. It was not only because of the trucks becoming more comfortable to drive or opportunities to zip right across thousands of miles, but also because the merchandise they carried made a big tangible difference to the recipients.
The overarching reason, however, was the huge bonuses that the drivers got to make with the time-bound deliveries of fresh fruits, meat, fish and vegetables to distant marketplaces.
In 1974, a Hollywood movie called White Line Fever touched upon all the forces at play in the trucking business – both the sunny side and the business's seamy underbelly. One of the negative fall-outs of this prosperity was the discovery of white line fever as a serious illness among the overworked truck drivers.
The lure of fat bonuses drove the drivers to drive for long hours, across state borders, often eating up hundreds of miles of desolate highways in a single night. The truck stayed rock-steady to the right of the white line drawn in the middle of the highway. The driver saw nothing but the white line receding by the truck, and the black road surface as far as the headlights went. Same picture in the driver’s viewing frame for miles, for hours. However, when fatigue kicks in, the eyes droop and the drivers tend to doze off.
But here is the kicker: even with his eyes closed, the driver is still seeing the same view – the white line, the road in the headlights. That is when the truck swerves, goes off track and the driver isn’t ‘there’ to take evasive action.
Those mishaps happened because of Highway Hypnosis.
In a few well-established FMCG companies, the existing Sales and Distribution channels are dictating the pace and shape of the company’s digital/e-commerce strategies. The ‘highway hypnosis’ brought about by decades of huge profits from the existing community of Distributors afflicted all levels, right from the top. The ‘white line fever’ of stocks being regularly lifted to the existing warehouses prevents all visible moves towards going digital. What is even more appalling is the extent of planned ignorance that is prevalent about all things digital among the senior and middle managers. "They are our partners. We have stuck through thick and thin. We are fine as we are," was the underlying refrain.
We have had a couple of quarters of better results, recruitment at campuses is up, and the Indian IT services industry is back to describing the ‘fast’ white line, and how they are on the 'right' side of the line, making good progress. Notice that there are no substantive changes in the composition of the business, new contracts are not reflecting any shift in the balance of power towards the service providers, and there is no reengineering of internal processes. They are hugging the status-quo with renewed passion and eyes tightly shut.
There are people in corporates who are asleep at the wheel, blanketed by the comforts of the present. Their zombie-like quarter-to-quarter drifting is proof of a raging White Line Fever. We need to wake them up!