Hey, Is That Your Relic?
Our world and economic order continues its journey through a Darwinian evolution. Looking back, we can readily observe transition points where new entrants or renewed players were better suited to succeed and those less adaptive or endowed, diminished and some eventually became extinct. A myriad of lenses will tell different stories, but with the same pattern, be they military, economic, disease driven, migratory, technological, political, religious, … , and organizations and enterprises. Behind this evolution remain artifacts, relics, traces of what each valued or held important as well as those changes and insights that transformed the quality of life and thought, becoming part of the tapestry of our lives.
The makeup of the Fortune 500 over that last 50 years is a rich depiction of that evolution, particularly the rise and fall of harvest economies, tech bubbles, financial service behemoths, and the new multi-polar players. I’m fascinated by the situation where two of the icons of British automotive prowess, Jaguar and Rover, are now part of Tata Group of India, the powerhouse that grew in a former British colony. The monuments and structures from the colonial empire became relics to the growth and transformation of human talent, capability, innovation and hunger to thrive, forever increasing in this multi-polar world.
For over 40 years, one particular poem has haunted my thoughts with its near perfection in weaving imagery with the message of what we value and what lasts. An interesting story behind this poem is that it is one of two with the same topic, part of a competition between Percy Bysshe Shelly and fellow poet, Horace Smith. It is about the then recently discovered tomb of Ramesses the Great, Pharaoh of the nineteenth dynasty of ancient Egypt, also known as Ozymandias.
- I met a traveller from an antique land
- Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
- Stand in the desert.
- Near them on the sand,
- Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
- And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
- Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
- Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
- The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
- And on the pedestal these words appear:
- `My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
- Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
- Nothing beside remains.
- Round the decay
- Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
- The lone and level sands stretch far away”.
As we endeavor to create value in our enterprises, what remains as positive change and what becomes a relic?
