What was there before

The Strategy Toolkit - March 2024 edition

Excerpt:  Strategy & History, part 4

We rounded out part three of strategy & history with the observation of historian Mary Beard that “history is about filling in the gaps.”  We can’t help but agree, and, since that newsletter edition, we’ve gathered a few more sources of insights that help to ‘fill the gaps’.  We’ll share these in this new part 4.

Most exciting is the recent contest, the Vesuvius challenge, to apply machine learning and computer visualisation software tools to unlock the information hidden within the burned papyrus scrolls of Herculaneum.*  Heretofore, historians had no technique to scan and delineate, letter by letter, word by word, what was originally recorded in these documents without destroying the documents themselves.  Having succeeded with one, researchers can spend the next decade exploring the rest.  We can’t wait to learn what will be found.  And seeing where else in the world of archeology (the Dead Sea Scrolls?) these techniques are applied.

* https://scrollprize.org/

Remember what we wrote about using the lens of context when learning about strategy & history?  An interesting example is in the research of Carl Schorske, an eminent cultural historian at Princeton University.  His analysis of what occurred in Vienna, Austria in the late 1800’s is a case in point.  In one of his many publications, “Thinking With History”, Schorske’s interpretation of why and how Vienna made the transition to modernity appeared to at least one reviewer as being coloured by his own views regarding the role of cultural change in driving the passage to modernity not only in Austria but throughout Europe.  A good strategist will enjoy reading this study along with opposing viewpoints, in order to arrive at their own perspective.

“Schorske’s point is that the architectural ideologies which would fling Vienna into the future are all rooted in the past…  Absolute monarchy has surrendered not only to the bourgeoisie, but unwittingly to modernity itself.  Here we have nothing less than the passage from the classical world to the modern.”*

* Graham, H., “Cobbling Modernity,” reviewing Carl Schorske’s “Thinking With History,” Princeton U Press (1998), in Books in Canada (October 1998): 8

As for the lens of people, one whom we need to include is none other than Suleiman the Magnificent, the great Ottoman sultan who almost changed the history of Vienna (and inadvertently what Schorske may have studied).  Despite his unlimited power, over time, historians such as De Bellaigue contrast how the Ottoman and Venetian empires fared, with inferences for their forms of governance and the events of today.  Again, we leave it to you to reach your own conclusions.