Accountancy Age .-Fantastic voyage.,how a search for Ithaca can help business
A story told by the poet Homer created a mystery that has taken 3,000 years to solve. Completion of this puzzle could have far-reaching implications for business management.
Financial Director, 03 Oct 2005
MEDITERRANEAN SEA, c1200BC: Fresh from his exploits in Troy, Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s Iliad, heads for home and to his kingdom on the Greek island of Ithaca.
But Homer, the greatest story-teller of this particular millennium, has other plans for him. Odysseus attacks and blinds a Cyclops and is taken prisoner by the nymph Calypso who has fallen in love with him. His wife, Penelope, has scores of suitors who want to marry her so they can become king of Ithaca. The god Poseidon thwarts almost every effort by Odysseus to go home. It is ten years before he finally returns to Ithaca, takes the long path from the southeast-facing bay, past Eumaios’ pig farm and enters his palace.
But where, exactly, is Odysseus? He can’t be on modern-day Ithaca, a small island off the west coast of Greece. The harbour faces the wrong direction. The island is too mountainous and not, as Homer describes it, “low lying”. And it certainly isn’t the “furthest west” of the group of islands of which it is part. That honour falls to Cephalonia. The problem is, Cephalonia simply doesn’t match Homer’s detailed description of the topography of Ithaca. Nor does any other island in the Ionian Sea. Greek scholars have searched far and wide for Odysseus’s kingdom. They haven’t found it.
Why would they expect to? The Odyssey is a tale of pure fiction. It involves one-eyed monsters and gods and even flying islands. The events described in Homer’s second epic poem were not even written down until around 500 years after they were first described; imagine if Shakespeare’s plays had never actually been committed to print until some time after the Second World War. Why should anyone expect an ancient Greek description of a small island to be regarded as ‘accurate’ in the 21st century? Many believe that Homer was just wrong.
Robert Bittlestone disagrees. The founder and chairman of software and consultancy group Metapraxis thinks that Homer’s description of Ithaca is so precise that it must have been real, even if the events that took place were fictional. That makes The Odyssey more like James Bond than Lord of the Rings, making Ithaca more akin to London, Russia or Jamaica than Mordor. More to the point, Bittlestone also thinks he’s now found Ithaca.
The result is a 600-page book that sets out to prove his theory about the modern whereabouts of ancient Ithaca. More importantly, the intellectual and investigative process by which Bittlestone undertook this endeavour offers unique insights into board level issues such as risk assessment, leadership and even performance management. This makes Bittlestone’s journey into the past – a journey that brought together ancient Greek scholars, modern geologists, satellite technology and the zeal of a relentlessly inquisitive amateur – a truly fantastic voyage of discovery.
It started during a holiday in Greece in 1998, while exploring some of the area that was reputed to be associated with Odysseus. “I’d always thought The Odyssey was just an imaginative poem,” Bittlestone explains. “And so you start thinking, if it really was an imaginary location, why would a Bronze Age composer of an extraordinarily long and detailed poem go into such enormous detail on the actual locations, describing the topography and the distances from A to B and where you go and what you pass when you go to [Odysseus’] palace? Why would all that matter so much if it was a figment of the imagination? And it started to occur to me that maybe that bit was real.”
Another Greek holiday in 2003, a family “Homer hunt” and a sudden recollection of a conversation that had taken place five years earlier gave Bittlestone the idea that perhaps the reason why no one had been able to find Ithaca was because earthquakes or other geological activity had changed the sea level over the past 3,000 years, altering the coastline and the appearance of the Greek islands. Bittlestone developed the theory that modern Ithaca’s larger neighbour, Cephalonia, was once two islands, that the modern-day peninsula of Paliki was once cut off from the rest of Cephalonia and was, in fact, ancient Ithaca.
The process by which ancient Ithaca came to be connected to Cephalonia involved thousands of years of earthquake-induced rockfalls and landslips, filling in the shallow sea channel between the two islands until, today, the highest point of this in-filled terrain is 180 metres above sea level.
Bittlestone’s remarkable, beautifully-illustrated book, Odysseus Unbound: The Search for Homer’s Ithaca (Cambridge University Press), delves into intricate detail about the work he undertook to see if his ideas could be right.
He came across the writings of a Christianera geographer, Strabo, that appeared to confirm his theory. He discovered that salt water had been found underground in a place that salt water probably had no business being, unless his theory was right. He met an astronomer who confirmed that the ‘star’ by which Odysseus’s boat was steering was almost certainly the planet Venus, lying in a southeastwardly direction. He got lucky when, by chance, a land imaging satellite zoomed over the precise area where Bittlestone was exploring, providing him with detailed photographs and land analysis. He enlisted a Greek scholar, James Diggle, who retranslated key parts of The Odyssey to make sure they were using accurate literary clues. He worked with a geologist from Edinburgh, John Underhill, who almost got the pair of them killed when he gave Bittlestone the news that, in his view, the theory was geologically valid: Bittlestone was driving on a treacherous road at the time and excitement almost got the better of him.
So Bittlestone, an amateur in Greek classics, geology, astronomy and satellite imaging technology, appears to have succeeded in finding ancient Ithaca where generations of academics have singularly failed. The problem, quite simply, is that Greek scholars know little about geology, while geologists tend to care little for the Homeric poems. Bringing them together resulted in not only new ideas and theories, but new scientific evidence about the geology of the area.
Herein lies the first lesson from this tale – that the outsider, who adopts a broad-based, multidisciplinary approach, can achieve things that experts cannot. “That’s what executive committees are all about,” Bittlestone says. “You’ve always got your different disciplines around the table and you know your job as CEO is to weld these together into a team with synergy, so the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”
Bittlestone also likens his achievement to the role of finance directors, whose function is very much a cross-disciplinary one, too. “For me, this has been all about trying to tell a story by analysing a lot of very complex data that one didn’t necessarily understand in detail oneself,” he says. “It is just extraordinary how much information [we found], how much time you need to spend with that and show it to experts.” He adds that, like FDs, he had to be sure he had accurate, up-to-date data, though he confesses that it’s funny to think of ‘up-to-date data’ when dealing with things that happened up to 3,200 years ago.
But more important than the leadership role that Bittlestone took in this voyage of discovery was the intellectual approach that he took. It was a combination of imagining the impossible, and endlessly asking ‘why’ or ‘why not’. “I think it was easier for me that I was a trespasser in those areas,” he says. “People have been wonderful all round the world, but I didn’t ring them up and say, ‘Look, I think I’ve got a theory of Homer’ – because then they’d think you came from the funny farm. But I did say ‘I’m very interested in how the landscape in this part of the world may have changed’. As a businessman, I was permitted to ask stupid questions and people patiently explained to me, ‘No, it’s not like that’. And I could say, ‘But why?’ People were very patie nt with me.
“But sometimes when even very distinguished academics explained something to me, you just occasionally can hear a little bit of a chink in their argument. You can just sometimes detect what you might call inherited wisdom. It’s a bit like a risk analysis, trying to find out what were the areas of professional knowledge that one was listening to that might have just not been 100% understood, what’s known, what’s conjecture, what are strongly-held beliefs?”
This determination to press on, to challenge ‘inherited wisdom’, to almost play the fool to get people to explain things that they, themselves, had perhaps never properly scrutinised, stood him in good stead. After all, he was trying to find out if it was possible that a land mass, 180 metres high at its peak, could be created in the incredibly short geological time frame of 3,000 years.
Technology played a huge part in helping Bittlestone unravel the mystery, particularly imaging and data visualisation technology. This is very much in Bittlestone’s camp: his company, Metapraxis, is involved in developing data visualisation software that helps corporate clients such as Tomkins and Unilever look at their financial performance data in ways that are more intuitive than trying to spot problem areas by ploughing through reams of spreadsheet printouts.
A great number of software tools were used and satellites played a leading role in this journey. The Digital Globe Quickbird satellite produced images with a resolution of 70cm from an orbit 450km high. Landsat photography from Nasa added to the array of imagery. But as impressive as satellite photographs are, they’re flat, like maps. Bittlestone combined that imagery with altitude data to produce ‘digital elevation models’ (DEMs) that make it easier to see and understand the topography and to understand how it has changed over time. Nasa’s new World Wind visualisation tool entered the armoury late in the project, and made the use of DEMs ‘instantaneous, ubiquitous and free’, as Bittlestone puts it.
But it’s not what the technology can do, but what you can do with the technology. It is now possible to almost literally ‘fly’ around the Greek islands – or almost anywhere else – to see, explore, examine and basically look at the world from whichever angle helps most. You can look straight down, you can feel as though you’re flying in a helicopter, you can almost touch the ground and ‘see’ the view from an ancient path as it rounds the corner of a mountainside. This proved immensely useful, obviously.
But having taken advantage of his knowledge of the usefulness of data visualisation techniques, Bittlestone is now feeding back into his own business the things he has learned from flying – virtually – around Ithaca.
Imagine, he says, flying around your business as though it were a video game. “We think it is now possible to devise a way of organising information so that you can construct a virtual reality environment for multinational management,” he explains. “Instead of management information being some boring set of numbers, you can say, here’s the UK, you’re flying over England, they give you a joy stick, you’re going over Bristol and you start to see little flashing lights where your stores are. We want the Clifton branch of Sainsbury’s, or whatever, to be flashing red, saying it’s below target. You zoom down to Clifton and in front of the front door at Clifton. I want to go seamlessly into that store and see the racks. There are all these things up on the racks – the Daz, whatever – but you’ve got the wrong colour on it because we’re either out of stock or the margin you’re making is below target and something needs to be done on the renegotiation of the buying.”
We’re getting closer to this virtual reality every month, of course. There are already websites, such as Google that carry aerial photography tied in with local data such as schools and shops. But what Bittlestone is talking about isn’t just XBox for corporates. It could, in fact, be the most fundamental impact of all – a change in the way businesses look at themselves, the way FDs and CEOs manage.
“Let me put it this way: when you use modern geo-spatial visualisation techniques, particularly the three-dimensional capabilities, you don’t have to decide up-front what you want to look at – you just go exploring. You fly, you zoom in, you zoom out, you tilt, you rotate, you pan, you look at things that catch your eye. And then as you zoom in on those interesting things you start to learn more about the detail and you think. And when you’ve thought that through you zoom back out again and you get the big picture again.”
So if, some day, FDs can set out truly exploring their businesses and not being presented with someone else’s preformatted view of reality, then that, thanks to one man’s enthusiasm to solve an ancient Greek mystery, could be the most fantastic voyage of all.
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