The world is completely in shockwave because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over just a century ago humanity faced a similar threat caused by the Spanish flu. Millions of people died after the first world war and it was hard to figure out what was going on. Today, we can leverage mass communication to control the behavior of millions of people. Over a century ago, radio had just emerged as a medium for mass communication. The invention of radio was not necessarily intended to warn people about the shortage of intensive care facilities or traffic information. Humanity was gripped by its fear for alien life.
But just before that, around the 1870’s, all kinds of ideas where proposed to build an optical telegraph with a mathematical language that could communicate signals to Mars. Scientist from the US, Italy, France and the UK started to collaborate because of their shared fascination for the extraterrestrial. In these years, a large parabolic mirror was build to reflect large quantities of sunlight to mars with such intensity that it could theoretically be seen from Mars. In the years that followed, the first telescopes were able to spot the canals on Mars that were made with linear precision. The canals came directly from the polar caps which sparked the idea that alien life on Mars made very sophisticated canals to provide themselves with drinking water by melting polar caps.
In the 50 years afterwards all army and naval radio operators were tasked to check for unusual signals and national radio was shut down 5 minutes on each hour. This was to make sure the signals from alien life were not missed. One of the benefits from this way of communication is that it established the premises for photogenic communication, something companies like Instagram leverage more then a century later.
What this imagination with the extraterrestrial also stimulated is that radio became a unity system for the whole world. Wise people figured that the whole world should be connected to learn from the wise lessons from the aliens, or to warn in case of a serious attack. So at first, radio partially became a national emergency system for martian attacks. The side effect of that constant availability of news was that nations became electronic communities over time. Radio made the world a smaller place intended to create a universal language and awareness. Because the scientist had noticed such straight canals they figured that the aliens must have been far ahead of humanity. They also argued that earth could become utopia, since that is was scientist figured they would learn from the wise aliens.
Fast forward into the 20th century, in the 1970’s it was still believed that we could learn from other planets how to rule the world. This is fascinating as we look that something we don’t know might hold the key to all wisdom. That opposes all the wisdom of most philosophers who always mentioned that the purpose of life is to “know thyself”. But for business, it is perhaps wise to know your environment well.
What can the curious executive learn from this?
Technology is not always determined, but it follows our fears and desires much better than we do ourselves. Nowadays, radio is available to us on almost every corner of the planet. We can choose our stations with very specific genres and programming. This has allowed us to form sub-cultures which previously only were possible through obscure literature and gatherings in the local community with a small number of people that might hold similar interests.
Today, we have an explosion of communication opportunities at hand that are in it’s availability as global as radio. Your local newspaper can now be read in the basecamp of mount everest. You can even downscale your level of interest and follow the Instagram page of your best friends dog which is presented like a fairy-tail. To make it personal, I can now find the most obscure techno on Spotify while camping on a remote Swedish island instead of having to go crate-digging in the suburbs of east Berlin. But, are aliens tapping into our energy system? And are they noticing everything we do online? It is far more likely that these aliens live in Silicon Valley then on Mars.
For business this represents a whale of opportunity and competition at the same time. Opportunities for global business are at hand all the time and for most support functions physical connection can become obsolete. The COVID-19 crisis proves that in a matter of weeks we made the transition to a digital working environment possible. Yet, for a lot of business that are part of a complex supply-chain, local anchorage is still increasingly powerful to be close to a global reach of customers at a fraction of the cost that historically came with establishing business abroad. With the opportunity to expand abroad now at the fingertips of small- and medium enterprises, the demand for country-specific market information has increased. Navigating these opportunities requires a realistic, yet entrepreneurial mindset.
Full credit goes to Anthony Enns as the authors of the original paper. This article oversimplifies some of the original content to create quick and easy understanding. The one-and-only aim of this paper is to further promote it’s content to a wider audience. For the original paper please visit:
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/intellect/rj/2019/00000017/00000002/art00005?crawler=true&mimetype=application/pdf
About:
Bram van Kleef is a International Business Consultant @ VanKleef/Andersson and is located in Amsterdam. He holds an MSc in Business Administration: International Business & Marketing from the Kristianstad University in Sweden. For inquiries: Bram@vankleefandersson.com
