What can the modern corporate learn from history?

It's slightly ironic to get life lessons from a TV program. The famous writer Roald Dahl once said (of television) 'It rots the sense in the head. It kills imagination dead'. Make of that what you may, but as it turns out I did get important insight from a certain episode of everyone's favourite mainstream fantasy porn, Game of Thrones.

There's a line in one of the later seasons, where the Arch Maester (head of the society of scholars, healers, scientists) talks to Samwell Tarly, a wannabe Maester about the importance of history and record keeping. In his words,

'People are little better than dogs. Don't remember any meal but the last and can't see anything but the next. Everytime you shut the door and leave, they start howling as if you are gone forever'.

The Arch Maester then goes on to talk about the multiple times over a thousand years, the people of the fictional kingdom thought that the end was near, but it never really was. It just seemed like that in the present moment, because they didn't know/ never bothered contemplating the multiple times people had felt that exact same way to the past.

Which brings me to the present. And the crying calls of our unique our times are and consequently the implications on everything from marketing to popular culture. I'll dare summarize these commonly held beliefs into the following three sentences.

1) The world is changing at a rate no generation has had to contemplate before

2) This generation is different from all generations before it. Millennials/iGen whatever you want to call them, are so different that almost everything we know about human nature needs to be thrown right out of the window.

3) Technological advancement from one year to the next is a virtual certainty

These conclusions seem obvious. The symptom of a post Digital age, the repercussions of the integrated circuit. Truths that are so self evident, examining them closer is a waste of time.

Well, do humor me a little by perhaps allocating some of your social media browsing time to the next few paragraphs.

1) The world is changing at a rate no generation has had to contemplate before. 

Let's talk about the last Russian Tsar Nikolai II. Depending on your level of general knowledge, you may know him for getting horribly murdered along his family in 1918, ending monarchy and kickstarting communism in Russia. Maybe you have heard the Boney M song 'Rasputin' about the mystic, who allegedly had him and his wife in a spell (the song is so catchy, I am humming it right now. Don't blame me if you do too)

What's relevant here though is what he tried to do with the Hague conventions, just a few years before World War 1. The Hague convention is perhaps the precursor to all the international peace treaties that exist today. Historical in its own right but not the part that concerns us. If you delve deeper. you will find Nikolai's intention behind calling the conferences, which is not only unexpected but even unimaginable today.

Nikolai II was essentially trying to stop all technological advancement, pertaining specifically to weapons but with obvious spill-overs to everything else.

It's difficult to imagine how concerned the popular sentiment would have to be about the rate of technological advancement, that heads of several governments spent days debating whether it would be a good idea to stop it all together? Or the naivety to think it was possible. 

Say whatever you might about the rate of technological advancement today, it has been going on long enough that it's acknowledged as a constant (i.e my point 3 which I will get into), but back in the 19th century , it was a scary new thing.

Electricity is a great example. I can't think of any modern example that's more disruptive than electricity was at its inception, thanks to its initial incorrect association as the source of life force (think Galvani or even Frankenstein's monster) in an era where most of the population was deeply religious, making the implications of technological advancement disconcerting at a metaphysical level few of us can imagine today

2) This generation is uniquely different from all generations before it. 

Ah my favourite point and a pet peeve of mine. The way we talk about the generation that's grown up with the internet and smartphones, would make you think that the fabric of Darwin's evolution has torn apart altogether, to reveal a new breed of human being. I have lost count of the number of meetings where I've been fed presentations on these differences.

I am not arguing against the fact that that the context we all live in is evolving dramatically and context / environment highly impacts behaviour. However basic human nature, our fundamental motivations, these I submit, have not changed.

This seems rather counter-intuitive. After all, your grandparents' motivations today seems to be quite different from your own. But what if you could talk to your grandparents when they were your age or even younger.

That's the cue for my next exhibit. The short film ' I am 20' shot in 1967. I'll copy paste the synopsis below as I can't do better.

'Those born on Independence Day in 1947 were selected from different parts of India and interviewed to know their hopes and desires, ambitions, hobbies, fears and frustrations and the result is this unique film'.

Ignoring the accents which were a touch strange to my ear (but no stranger than a contemporary foreign accent), it was stunning how their hopes and dreams mirrored anything that 20 year olds would say today.

How about 'I would like to travel all over, document it with lots of pictures'. Instagram generation anyone?. Nope, that TN Subramanian, who would be more than 70 today, talking at about the 0:44 second mark. Or at 4:29, where another 20 year old gentlemen says 'My needs. Of course they are more. I have more money to buy things. I see more things in the market. So I buy them'.

I highly recommend a watch (It's only 18 minutes anyway). It has a lot of English but of course Indian languages sprinkle through. And if you are Indian, you will literally see caricatures of real people you know in your life, and be shocked that people were exactly like you and your friends, more than fifty years back.

I strongly believe that human nature always remains the same while the context changes. Young people will always be more idealistic, more optimistic and with a broader spectrum of dreams and possibilities than older people. Goodness knows that at 34 I am considerably more jaded than I was at 24, and at 14, the world was my oyster. Yes technology changes the surroundings and even the lens through which we operate, but that doesn't change the basic human needs of self expression, seeking a purpose and of course the pursuit of happiness. Yet we, particularly in the marketing community, talk about these needs (particularly self expression and purpose) as if they just emerged yesterday and are unique to those blessed with a high metabolic rate.

3) Technological development from one year to the next is a virtual certainty 

The fact that this is an absolutely incorrect statement is well known amongst historians, but even me, a fan of history, was completely unaware of this till a few years ago. For the longest time of recorded history (till the last 400 years), the graph of human technological innovation has had ebbs and flows. Two examples that have stuck in my memory.

The ancient Neo-Assyrian Empire, extending from modern day Iran to Egypt, with its capital of Nineveh, was renowned for technological progress, till it inexplicably collapsed (one of the great mysteries of history), leaving the Greek and Romans to pick up rather behind their watermark and work their ways to surpass it.

Speaking of the Romans, they provide another great example of regressive technological progress. The story goes that in the middle ages, a few centuries after the fall of the Roman empire, people used to look at the ruins of Roman structures like Aqueducts, and wonder whether in earlier times, giants roamed the earth, as they had no clue how ordinary men could construct such large structures.

The dizzying rate of technological progress in the last twenty years (and possibly the smartphones that re-invent themselves every year and dominate our attention), I believe, puts on our eyes blinkers, blinding us to the fact that the last seventy years has had an unusual level of peace (small locally contained conflicts notwithstanding) which is an exception rather than the rule.

Coming back to Darwinism, humans have not changed so fundamentally that we can say with confidence that this peace will be everlasting, leading us to take technology to never seen heights. Indeed our toys are more dangerous now. For all their faults, the cold war generation didn't take peace or consumerism for granted.

I'll end this point and this piece with a thought that often gives me the chills. Living in a modern city like Singapore, with a robust economy and almost flawless systems, I can find it imaginable that it can all crumble away in the matter of years or months. Yet if you were a resident of Berlin circa 1936/1937, you would have thought the same. You live in a modern city, maybe the most modern in the world, it hosted the Olympics after all. Your property prices are robust. The economy is going bonkers. Every year you have new wonders of technologically like those Grand Prix cars that can hit 300 kmph or the ballpoint pen that just made ink pens look silly (everyone wrote in the 1930s. Imagine how big an innovation the convenience of the ballpoint pen was)

Little could you have imagined the scenes from Dante's inferno that would ensue in 1945, when the Allied armies finally broke through, and conquering soldiers did to the Berlin residents, exactly what conquering soldiers, dehumanised by war, always do. As they did at Nanking ten years earlier, or what the Mongols did five hundred years before them, or what the Romans did thousands of years earlier. What is that? Look it up, but let's just say that beyond dragons and magic, Game of Thrones is not entirely based on fantasy.

Net, I am making no predictions about whether there will be an iPhone 25.