Business Insight Zone

Many years ago now, I got to meet Robert Ballard after he had given a lecture about his deep-sea explorations. This 18-minute video from TED captures his friendliness, his energy, and his intelligence.

Bonus: It also includes really cool pictures from the ocean depths, which, when you think about it, is your ace in the hole when you’re a pioneering deep-sea explorer.

The whole thing is worth watching, not least for Ballard’s emphasis on how we need to attract kids to the wonders of science long before they reach college. But I think there’s a business lesson to be drawn from his talk, too — and not just that we might start mining precious metals from the ocean’s depths.

Partway through the talk, he points to a big map that depicts the world’s seafloor formations. (He says it’s not really a “map,” for reasons he makes clear in the lecture.) He points out an underwater mountain range south and east of New Zealand, then points out a contrasting area of no mountains further south and west.

Why are there mountains in the first area by not the second? When he posits this questions to his graduate students, they suggest different answers grounded in geophysics. But then he springs his trap:

“Because that’s where a ship’s been.”

We know there are mountains in the first region because ships have been there to map the ocean floor. Our maps don’t show any mountains in the second region because it’s remote and ships with the right instrumentation don’t go there. For all we know, that unexplored region could hold untold wonders, scientific or even commercial. For all we know.

What parts of YOUR business, YOUR market, YOUR industry are left unexplored simply because no one has yet thought to “send a ship” there?

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Category: Management, The working life