The Chinese flu that changed my life…in 2011

The emergency we are living in these days is testing us. Good chances are that it will see us changed -hopefully in better- with a clearer idea of what smart working is. In this regard, we want to share how SweetHive was born, the platform on which BusinessRM is based, with this contribution from Danilo Rea, the founder of the project.

That terrible flu I got in China

In 2011 I was working in China, in Wuxi, at a huge plant for pipes production. I had been there since a few weeks when I caught a terrible flu. I was forced to stay in my hotel for many days with a high temperature. It was the middle of winter and outside there were -10 degrees: it didn’t look like it was going to be a short recovery.

With the other European colleagues we were mocking each other via texts, because it was striking us down one by one: it was a common flu, not serious. But the story of the SARS was not very distant and irony was the best way to deal with the situation.

How the idea for SweetHive was born

In these days of chaos caused by coronavirus my mind often jumps back to that period, because it was that illness and those days with a high temperature that changed my life. During one of those nights in which I was waiting for the medicine to grant me some relief, I found myself looking at the skyscrapers outside my window.

It was then that I imagined for the first time the platform that would become SweetHive, the platform BusinessRM is based on.

The strange relation between a mild flu and SweetHive

Hundreds of thousands of windows in front of me corresponding to thousands of offices, flats, schools and much more: this image began to tickle my imagination. I started to ask myself how it could be possible to recreate in the digital era this multiplicity of situation, behind which there was an order, a sense.

I remember that the very idea of being able to solve a problem like this gave me enough energy to climb out of bed, register a domain and begin to take notes on the concept of digital hive.

It took 3 years to launch SweetHive in the Silicon Valley and later open the operational headquarters in Milan. And other 5 years passed before seeing the project into action, clients increasing and develop the thematic clusters to enter in different sectors and open an office in London. In hindsight, without that virus, there would have never been any of this.

SweetHive and the digital hive

Getting back to us, to this period of confused information, of unpredictable economic prospects. Days in which schools must deal with e-learning and companies with smart working.

Forced by circumstances to enter in a digital connection between us, this is the moment in which the concept of “digital hive” can become more evident for everybody. It is not enough to have chats, video calls that allows us to establish relations: flexible structurers are needed to help us understand where we are with our activities and how they proceed.

We need a support that recreate in the cloud the patterns and the organisation of our daily routine: a precise correspondence – currently non-existent – between the physical world and the virtual one. This correspondence is called Digital Hive or digital hive, and it’s the foundation for our work on SweetHive and BusinessRM.

What did I learn from digital hive during this second (and unfortunately more devastating) influence?

Wherever I am physically, my digital hive supports me when I am at home or at the company or in all these communities and places that I care about, like family and friends. I feel I can always work and interact without missing anything. I never stop but, at the same time, I don’t feel pressured by thousands of inputs. I don’t feel isolated because of force majeure.

The digital hives help us keep things moving forward in the best way, they maintain people connected and busy. They allow us and our users to recreate online the physical world that is before anything else an organised representation in our mind.

They help us align every time to the most suitable mindset taking into account the context in which we work (office, school, city…). They replicate the walls, the furniture, the officed and even the coffee corner.

My wish for the future

I started this story talking about a Chinese flu in 2011. I recalled these past moments, maybe also because I find difficult to decode this present. Maybe because I have to understand better (or I feel I have to share) the tools that we can use to face the future.