Futurist Thomas Frey: I often describe the future with human-like characteristics. By doing so, it helps me think through our relationship with the future in novel ways. So here is an example of this:
The future hates complacency. It hates complacency so much so that it has built-in self-sabotaging mechanisms to continually hold our feet to the fire. It will not allow us to shift into neutral. If we are not moving forward, we are moving backwards. There is no middle ground.
People are at their best when they are challenged. If we don’t challenge ourselves, the future has a way of giving us challenges anyway. There is great value in our struggles and human nature has shown us that we only tend to value the things we struggle to achieve.
We are currently out of balance between backward-looking problem-solving and forward-looking accomplishments. Forward accomplishments help erase past problems. They solve problems in a different way. We need more forward-looking accomplishments, and our greatest undertakings in the future will come in this area.
Yes, I understand this sounds a bit abstract, but bear with me.
Our need for future accomplishments will also create a need for better systems to regulate, manage, and leverage the activities surrounding them. These systems will need to be global in nature, and over time, a few will emerge to challenge the power of nations. That time is coming very soon.
From National Systems to Global Systems
For decades the ringing of the bell marked the opening and closing of each day on the New York Stock Exchange. This symbolic beginning and ending of the workday had set the pace for business in the US. To many, work only seemed to mattered when the money people were watching.
However, that all changed once the Internet gave day-traders the ability to manage accounts around the world on the Tokyo, Honk Kong, Indian, Athens, and London stock exchanges. Start and stop times suddenly became blurred, and eventually went away. The metronome of business began to pulse to a different beat, and the once distinct start and stop times of Wall Street ended, it created never-ending business routines framed around a non-stop marathon of opportunities.
This ever quickening pace of business has given strategists a whole new playbook, which has, in turn, forced companies to devise new systems and strategies to not only give them a competitive edge, but in the process, trump the competition.
Government, on the other hand, has virtually no competition, and consequentially, little motivation to innovate. Like a lumbering elephant alongside the sleek cat-like speed of business, government has done little to keep pace with change, and even less to experiment, innovate, and improve.
Our governmental systems are evolving at speeds that are exponentially slower than them businesses that use them.
People in government are synchronized to a radically different clock. They are neither driven to compete nor incentivized to reinvent themselves. With their change-resistant inertia firmly anchored in the past, internal government systems have grown increasingly dysfunctional, sparking a growing voice of discontent among business veterans. Deteriorating education, increasingly expensive healthcare, a legal system with an unfathomable number of laws, seemingly corrupt financial institutions, incomprehensible tax codes, and an adversarial attitude toward change have all paved the way for a new breed of governing entities to emerge.
FedEx as a Global System
The original idea for FedEx came when Fred Smith wrote a term paper as an undergraduate at Yale about a very simple observation: As society automated, as people began to put computers in banks to cancel checks, and people began to put sophisticated electronics in airplanes, the corporate world was going to need a completely different logistics system.
Fred was working as a charter pilot at the Tweed New Haven Airport flying to various airports in the New England states talking to pilots who worked for many of the high-tech companies like IBM and Xerox and found out what a difficult proposition it was to keep their field-service engineers and their parts and logistics systems operating. Many of the corporate airplanes had to be repurposed to fly computer and machine parts around whenever something broke down.
Several years later, after a stint in the Marines, Fred revisited the problem and found out that things had become significantly worse.
Emery Air Freight was trying to solve the exact same problem, but was trying to use an infrastructure built around passenger planes, which weren’t designed to handle freight. So they were force-fitting the rapid movement of high-value-added and high-technology products into a transportation system that wasn’t designed for it.
So FedEx was proposed as a customized system to solve this problem. To do this they had to have a nationwide clearinghouse – an integrated system with trucks and planes to give the level of service that customers needed.
For their network, they used the Federal Reserve Bank clearing house system, where all payments converge on a central location to complete the transaction, as their model. And that’s where the Federal Express name came from. Fred wanted something that sounded substantial and nationwide, and American Express had already been taken.
It was all made possible when the government began to deregulate the airline industry. Prior to that time, both surface and air transportation was erroneously based on linear routes, with complicated systems for making connections.
It all came together during 1977-78 when the airlines were deregulated. A couple years later in 1980, the US federal government deregulated interstate transportation. Because the Postal Service had a monopoly on delivering mail, document delivery wasn’t allowed from a legal standpoint until 1978. The standards changed in 1978 as to what constituted an item that was covered by the postal monopoly. Merrill Lynche and a few others waged an ongoing assault through lobbyists and the press saying, telling Congress that the USPS service was not acceptable. At the time, Merrill was being hamstrung in its efforts to move bond “Blue Books” and other types of financial prospectuses.
Bowing under the pressure, congress exempted certain types of publications and documents from the postal monopoly in legislation called the Private Express Statutes. As long as a company was delivering something overnight, and charged twice as much as the First Class postage stamps, then it was exempt from the Postal monopoly. So that defined the business FedEx went into.
Backed with venture capital funding amounting to $91 million, along with another $4 million that Fred Smith had personally received as an inheritance, FedEx started out with 14 planes, initially flying between 25 cities.
In 1985 FedEx began regularly scheduled flights to Europe, adding service to Japan in 1988, the Middle East in 1989, and the rest of the world in 1991.
In just 18 years FedEx had become a global delivery system, not unlike many of our other global systems, most of which took centuries to develop.
Eight Current Global Systems
Global systems are a fascinating area of study because they provide a context so few ever consider.
When we look at early systems such as written communications with Phoenician cuneiform, Mayan numerals, or the systems that had to be in place for engineering and building the Egyptian pyramids, it’s easy to see that system thinking has been around a long time. But global systems are a more recent innovation.
The most obvious advantage to global systems are the efficiencies they create. As an example, when a person who has spent their life hunting and fishing for food is able to walk to a store and purchase food, they suddenly have far more time in their life to do other things.
Similarly, when a company who has had to make painful arrangements for the delivery of goods from the other side of the world can begin working with FedEx who provides painless global delivery, the company suddenly has time to focus on other critical problems.
Here are eight examples of global systems and their development:
1. Global Trade – In 1264 when Marco Polo traveled the fabled “Silk Road” from Europe to what is now Beijing, China, he made some of the first inroads into creating a system for global trade.
2.