The Shrinking World

The times when I am amazed by the shrinking of the world, seems to be growing. 

But when you play “who do you know” you soon realize that in our lives we run in fairly small circles and so the chances of knowing somebody is pretty high.  And when you read Freakonimics or Malcolm Gladwell, you realize that probability suggests increasingly strange coincidences.

But in the larger world, outside our small geographic or socio-economic realms it becomes more surprising.  And I am continually impressed as I travel the small streets, the back alleys, the mews of Europe to find so many people who know, use and rely on http://www.marketresearch.com/.  It is a perspective you miss from the behind a desk in Rockville Maryland.

I have been in tiny offices in Brussels and office shares in London, picturesque buildings on the banks of Lake Zurich and on top of the tallest skyscrapers in Canary Wharf and found our clients experiencing what we hoped they would when we started the company 10 years ago.

I have spoken to people and watched orders come in from all over the world and am amazed at the impact.  When you hear someone at a university in Brussels, in broken English/French using our lingo, KWIC, Kalorama, Profound, I still find it remarkable.

But so far this is the strangest twist. 

My wife goes on an overnight walking trip to the Cotswold’s and meets a woman who tells us she is moving back to the states.  On their 11-mile walk she lets out that there are some things she’s trying to divest herself of.  A week later I am in her packed up apartment picking up space heaters, alarm clocks and half empty bottles of Pimms.

Sad to leave London, but overflowing with praise for the three years, her husband enters the room and we begin talking about his return home.  The job he has in the UK?  Head of Market Research for an international consumer goods company.

And so he volleys back to me "and what do you do?" 

I have a market research company, named Marketresearch.com.  And he returns, I am a customer of Marketresearch.com and I use Packaged  Facts and I know Larry (his sales rep).

Although I receive no further discount on the goods I am buying, walking home down Maida Vale lugging their leftovers I realize again that in this overlapping/combined world the chances of chance meetings are increasing every day.