There is an adage, “all roads lead to Rome” which has its roots in the “roads to Rome” as immortalized in the Milliarium Aureum monument. The monument celebrates that many roads in Europe, about half a million roads, radiates back to the ancient Italian capital. Today the adage talks about a Golden Milestone taken into some sort of Ultimate Business Goal in which despite the number of many roads it will take to reach it, will eventually reach it. There is even a paper written by researchers at a Finnish university that features that idiom:
Business models and business model change have drawn increasing attention from both researchers and practitioners across various disciplines, including the domain of entrepreneurship. However, even though the importance of business model innovation as a driver of firm performance has been widely acknowledged, empirical studies explaining the business model change remain limited. This study contributes to prior research by examining the effects of effectual and causation-based decision-making logics on the degree of business model change in the context of small and medium-sized enterprises in Finland. The findings of hierarchical regression analysis show that both causation and effectuation-based logics have positive effects on business model change, thereby highlighting the need for both strategizing and seizing of opportunities in business model development.
There is also a project featured on IEEE VISAP 2016 which visualizes this mobility statement and takes it even further by visualizing mobility in other countries and transportation systems around the Rome-equivalent.
Anyway, so why write about this…
I think that in our lives, we have at least one of our own personal, gilded Milliarium Aureum. In this same token that Emperor Caesar Augustus erected it so that distances of the Empire are measured against it, we have our own where we measure our own life’s goals, plans and beliefs against it. We have our own Milliarium Aureum which is our core personal beliefs and we build our lives in order to be able to act upon this. Let’s say a core belief is to do no harm unto others, we therefore act upon our lives so that we do this and to varying degrees of intensity – like agreeing not to buy fast fashion from a company that uses child labour, or having spirituality that espouses this.
When I did coaching sessions, the coach would ask me leading questions as to why certain thought processes would come up for me. And I would give an answer, like, “to be more independent“. And then she would try to dig deeper and ask even more questions. It sounds very easy but it’s very difficult to go through and I talk and think about aspects of myself that I otherwise don’t think about. From these sessions, I found that independence is a term that is constantly coming up and I realize that is one of my Milliarium Aureum.