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October 30, 2006
The World's Not Flat
Arrived this morning in London after an overnight flight from San Francisco and am again struck by how much I love this city.
Like New York, it has a quick rhythm, a feel of business being done during bankers' hours and beyond, a fashionable sense that transcends glitter and glamor but settles instead on a quiet, understated confidence. Like San Francisco, but less so, London's also a beautiful city.
Now, I could spend thousands of words trying to say useful things about those three great cities, but I won't. Not only has it been done before, but it's been done to death. In fact, the whole genre of city comparison has been done to death. And if city comparison's not at least a sub-genre within travel writing it should be.
Instead, I'd like to chat about something even more obvious, something that once received a great deal of coverage. In fact, from the time of Marco Polo until quite recently, it formed the core of most travel writing. What's this big, obvious core idea that's recently gone missing?
It's still a very big world.
It sounds silly to say it but please bear with me: this idea's much more important than the prosaic phrase that summons it.
In our increasingly travel-saturated world it's actually quite easy to get a fairly accurate sense of London--or Paris, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, etc.--as well as the "there-ness" of the place. You may not be able to anticipate the smells, but you can easily learn enough about the sights and sounds of any major city to give you a good enough advance sense of what you're in for when you arrive that your experience of the place when you do arrive is a recognition of what you expect rather than an overwhelming sense of otherness or difference. And while that's certainly good from a tourism perspective, that's actually a very bad thing from a talent perspective.
Tom Friedman's made something of a career of developing elaborate analogues between cities and cultures to make simple--but often important--points about parallel or non-linear effects of the same causes. His most recent tome, The Earth is Flat, attempts a history of the future based on the trends he observes in the war for talent (and a number of other things). But to make his case he resorts to his own flattening of the world--what Mahmood Mamdani calls "history by analogy"--in which superficial similarities take the place of serious analysis and careful thought.
Though the advent of so many media have made our lines of sight into one another's lives increasingly clear--and though they've made mutual understanding easier to attain--they have not eliminated the underlying differences that make cultures and places unique. If your brand needs to be clear, compelling, relevant, resonant and differentiating--and it does--you must resist the temptation to flatten the world. It is the differences, not the similarities, between places and cultures that determine the success or failure of your positioning.
Posted by davidkippen at October 30, 2006 09:52 AM