For Christmas, I got this wonderful book about the Brooklyn Bridge. It is called "The Great Bridge" by David McCullough. One part, he wrote about the first bridge to cross the Niagara Gorge built by Charles Ellet. The way Ellet started the bridge was to offer five dollars the first American boy who could fly a kite over to the Canadian side of the gorge. The bridge span was 1,010 feet, and young Homer Walsh won the prize. Ellet took the kite string that spanned the gorge, and tied successively heavier cords and pulled them across the gorge until he had a heavy cable spanning the gorge and from that he built his bridge.
This story reminded me of our team's first efforts of building a business taxonomy. We started with a simple flat set of categories, and then added a second set of categories. After that we migrated to hierarchical trees, and then to banyans, and today we are ever adding features and complexity to our business taxonomy. But we could not have gotten to where we are today, unless we had first tried our first simple solution to span our own problem.
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