Al Gore used to be known as the nearly man, as the US presidential candidate who famously won the US presidential election popular vote by more than 500,000 votes, the most for any Democrat in US history, yet lost the presidency by 5 electoral votes. A lesser man would have crumbled with such a career calamity, but here is a man who went on to become an Oscar, Grammy and a Nobel Prize winner.
But many people do not know that this is the same man who had a hand in moulding the infrastructure that shaped the early days of the internet. No, he didn’t invent the internet, he was merely misquoted in a TV interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
Here is what was reported on Wikipedia :
‘Gore was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship. The Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication.As a Senator, Gore began to craft the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 (commonly referred to as "The Gore Bill") after hearing the 1988 report Toward a National Research Network submitted to Congress by a group chaired by UCLA professor of computer science, Leonard Kleinrock, one of the central creators of the ARPANET (the ARPANET, first deployed by Kleinrock and others in 1969, is the predecessor of the Internet). The bill was passed on December 9, 1991.’ and led to the National Information Infrastructure (NII) which Gore referred to as the "information superhighway."
Little wonder that, after the presidential defeat, Gore sat on the board of Apple and was also a senior advisor to Google during its formative days. We all know how those panned out. No, he didn’t invent the internet, but it’s fair to say he helped shaped Web 2.0
This week marks the days leading to Earth Hour on 28 March, when businesses all over the world vote to switch off all lights for an hour. Here’s an except from http://www.earthhour.org/about/
‘This year, Earth Hour has been transformed into the world’s first global election, between Earth and global warming. For the first time in history, people of all ages, nationalities, race and background have the opportunity to use their light switch as their vote – Switching off your lights is a vote for Earth, or leaving them on is a vote for global warming. WWF are urging the world to VOTE EARTH and reach the target of 1 billion votes, which will be presented to world leaders at the Global Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen 2009.’
In our own world, in Mindshare, we should take a leaf from Al Gore’s urging of people to change the way they lead their lives on mother Earth.
To those who have watched the movie, you heard the Truth. To those who haven’t, read the following and draw its analogy to our own industry – ‘Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced.’
"The truth about the climate crisis," Gore says, "is an inconvenient one that means we are going to have to change the way we live our lives."
Nothing lasts forever. No winning strategy can last forever – Mindshare, like Al Gore, pioneered the media specialist industry but 10 years on, Mindshare is now a victim of its own success because our competitive advantage has been eroded by copycat agencies who are charging lower and lower, and even lower, just to get ahead.
Our industry is much like Earth’s climate, it’s in crisis. We are at the threshold of our industry’s epic destruction. It’s an inconvenient truth to many in Mindshare, in our industry, but it’s the damn truth! Our trees/fees are being burnt, and in no time, we will have no land in our industry.
So here's the dilemma : are we content on being the 'nearly man' or should we lead the transformation of our industry?
Take a leaf from Gore’s transformation, from a nearly president to Time’s runner-up (ok, nearly again!) for 2007 Person Of The Year.
Not bad for a man who nearly became the US President. After all, he transformed the internet, which is now part of our transformation to New Marketing specialists.
In a way, aren’t we glad for that?
Contributed by :
Jimmy Lim
Mindshare Singapore
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