Sorry we missed last week's tip. Now we continue with "Revolution at Our
Door."
Part Three: Lessons from Mazamet
[This thread started 10/16/00]
Several days ago, I was part of a group of diverse business thinkers,
academics and professionals looking at the topic of "Redefining the
Construction Industry’s Value Chain: New Business Rules for Collaboration and
Procurement." This workshop, sponsored by the Fisher Center for Information
Technology and Marketplace Transformation, was created by Beatrice Benne, a
young friend of mine with a European architectural degree, who is pursuing
her Ph.D. in architecture and computer studies at UCB.
Beatrice is a native of Lacabarede, a tiny town in the Southwest of France
(with "500 people if you count the cows!" she says) near Albi, the birthplace
of Toulouse-Lautrec. Beatrice has been in the US four years exploring the
influence of IT on collaborative business processes. She is looking into the
murky crystal ball of the 21st Century to see if she can make out the
construction industry of the future.
Ironically, Beatrice comes from a neighborhood in the world that experienced
its own transforming revolution years ago. And I don’t mean the French
revolution. I mean the industrial revolution in the town of Mazamet, just
fifteen minutes from Lacabarede. By the 16th century Mazamet, situated at
the foot of La Montagne Noire (Black Mountain), had become a large wool
center because of the skills of their tradesmen and the pure water flowing
down the mountain from the River Arnette. In 1851, Monsieur Houlès and sons
started importing bales of sheepskin from Buenos Aires for processing; later
skins from Australia and New Zealand were also sent to this now booming
region. Mazamet tradesmen, as the story goes, had discovered a new
methodology for processing wool using fermentation. Thus was born the
fellmongering or délainage industry—(it sounds much better in French, but
then doesn’t everything?)
As a result of this superior methodology and the abundant source of clean
water, Mazamet was the center of the wool trade until the middle of the 20th
Century. At that time new forms of transportation, industrial automation, and
increasingly sophisticated technology developing in urban centers changed the
structure of commerce so radically that Mazame’s wool-production economy
collapsed; it fell back to being a small village at the foot of a mountain
known for its clear water.
In our next episodes, we’ll come back to Mazamet, to Beatrice’s quest, and
the pending revolution. And, in so doing, we’ll explore the following
questions:
- How will businesses make money in the 21st Century?
- What do the dot.coms have to teach the Bechtels and the GMs of the world?
- What values in our lives will reshape the future?
- Will our wild rivers survive?
