Greenland Up?

The late management guru, Peter Drucker, wrote that we know only two things about the future:

• It cannot be known.


• It will be different from what exists now and from what we now expect.

In business this is evident all the time. Three years ago, Dell was sitting pretty as its main competitor H-P was trying to recover from a messy "divorce" from its CEO and tyring to figure out how to overcome a disadvantageous cost position. Today, Dell is trying to figure out how to come out from under weakening demand in a mature PC business and changing consumer preferences for buying those computers (one that actually has favored H-P). Business Week reports Dell is now desparately looking to acquire companies that can get it into new growth businesses.

Drucker's statement works for economies and countries as well. It was a great irony to learn (sometime in my youth or adulthood) that despite their names and their latitudes, Iceland was a land of opportunity while Greenland was a desolate mass of ice. Reagan and Gorbachev held their famous summit in Reykjavik, Iceland (Greenland was never an option). Iceland was home to many banks and the climate is considered quite balmy compared to other northern exposures.

Yet, today The Business Week asks if Greenland is now the "next emerging economy"? Ruled by Denmark, the large island is about to be granted a right to self-government for the 56,000 people that live there (mostly native inuits). It seems Greenland has some resources of value today -- swift rivers (translated to hydroelectric power) and lead and zinc. The low power costs are important to businesses like computer storage companies who must store servers in cool, regulated places. Conversely, Iceland has suffered mightily from the financial meltdown . . . Even for countries fortunes change because the future always changes.

Ironically, Greenland's surge will be further helped by global warming; as ice melts, rivers run faster and now-covered resources (i.e., lead and zinc) become accessible. I suspect our race to reverse global warming effects will have all kinds of consequences--intended and unintended.