Introduction
1873—a typical year of the last third of the 19th century, a breathtaking century of ever accelerating progress. The population of Europe had doubled since the turn of the 19th century. The "last frontier" of the American continent had been pushed westward to reach the Pacific. In 1869, the "Golden Spike" was hammered home in Utah, joining the Central and Union Pacific Railroads to form the first transcontinental railway. Thousands of pioneers settled the regions east of the rivers Missouri and Mississippi. An international network of means of traffic and communication already covered the globe and acted as accelerator to the Industrial Revolution.
1873 was the year when Jules Verne published his novel "Around the World in Eighty Days." When he calculated eighty days to circumnavigate the world, he was still writing the best science fiction of his time. But historians have long proved that even in 1873 a trip around the world was theoretically feasible in eighty days, using the means of travel of the era.
Verne's novel marks one of the first culmination points of globalization. "Has the world grown smaller?," asks one of the gentlemen in London's prestigious Reform Club, fueling a vivid discussion that finally leads to Phileas Fogg's trip around the world. Verne shows that western means of transport and communication have in fact altered our notion of global space. Countries far away become closer if they can be traversed by train. Steamboats connect the U.S. and Europe at the end of the 19th century. The meaning of distance and space changes.
But why should the business strategist worry about space?
Thinking about space and spaces seems entirely disconnected at first sight from the daily preoccupations of business leaders. But space has a strikingly strategic quality. The possibility to choose the space in which our actions play out makes it a truly strategic factor. We can choose whether to pursue our business more strongly in China or in the United States; we can decide in which channels we want to sell products, and we can establish production plants in global networks throughout the entire world. Managers can discover new opportunities for growth of their business at the frontiers of current markets and business models. There, they can find vast, unexplored spaces. Occupying them long before competitors do can secure competitive advantage and create new value.
What can such "new spaces" be? It can be geographic expansion into a new region, but also the discovery of a new way of interacting with customers or a new product. Is "space" therefore just synonymous with "market"? We think it is not. Music exchange through the Internet, for example, occupied an (illegal, Napster-branded) space long before it became a real business market.
Thinking about Verne's perspective on the global traveler Phileas Fogg, the increased connectivity of global markets, and the accelerated exchange between them, plays a key role in global business today. The change of space also changes the way companies operate in it.
Space is also a cognitive phenomenon. Our brains produce cognitive maps that reflect a socially constructed reality and represent our views of the space we act in.
For example, medical research has shown that London taxi drivers develop significantly enlarged hippocampi in their brains (see exhibit). They develop specific cognitive maps, in this case of the streets of London, and adapt them daily. Everything that is not reflected in or outside this cognitive map needs to be learned. If managers accept certain statements and ideas without questioning their assumptions, they follow their (limited) cognitive maps. By doing so, they often limit their own competence and capabilities. Only few managers are aware that their own cognitive maps are limited by definition and restrict their view of the world and of specific business problems. If managers acknowledge the subjectivity of their own cognitive maps and the existence of other, probably more powerful maps (e.g., at competitors), they can significantly enlarge their strategic space.
Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne's "Around the World in Eighty Days" shows us how to push the boundaries of one's own mental map by simply not accepting the common belief of his peers that circumnavigating the world in eighty days is impossible.
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