On June 30, 1908, a little after 7:00 AM in the area that is now Krasnoyarsk Krai on the Lower Tunguska River, a huge explosion flattened more than 80 million trees on 830 square miles of Siberian taiga. The explosion was estimated at one-thousand times greater that the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945. The cause of the explosion is not known for sure, but some scientists surmise that it was a large comet or meteor striking the Earth. The evidence does not support that contention, however, but pictures of the site look more like an air-burst than an impact since there is no crater to support the impact theory.

The site was not investigated until 1921 because of political unrest and ultimately the Russian Revolution. The scientific team that arrived at Tunguska was amazed to see so much devastation but no evidence of any impact. The trees appeared to be charred, those at the estimated center of the blast were still upright, though stripped of bark and burned. Radiating out from the epicenter the trees were flattened, knocked down facing away from the blast.

Some theorists claim that the blast was the result of Nicola Tesla testing his “death ray” device that purportedly harnessed the magnetic powers of the Earth. Tesla’s machine was the inventor’s attempt to make war unimaginable by giving every country on Earth an invisible Chinese Wall of protection against aggression or invasion. Tesla stated that his death ray would destroy as many as ten thousand aircraft from as far as 250 miles away. At the age of 78, with World War II looming, Tesla approached British Prime Minister Chamberlain about his defensive machine, but Chamberlain was in the process of resigning over his underestimation of Hitler’s power and threat.

Today scientists recognize the validity of Tesla’s research and some think it may have been possible to develop such a device as the rumored death ray. But, most of Tesla’s research data was lost or destroyed after the inventor’s death, so nothing has come from his years of research and development.

A little over a year ago our planet experienced another Tunguska Event, this one being economic rather than physical. Much of our economy was flattened by a combination of bank failures, insurance company fraud, real estate bubbles burst and a general financial meltdown brought about by easy credit, high credit limits, sub-prime lending to unqualified borrowers, social entitlements paid for by taxpayer dollars and a host of other mitigating factors. The response from the Executive and Legislative branches of our government has been to exacerbate the problem by incurring even more of a financial deficit by throwing money at the problem (the usual political response to any situation). Our brilliant leaders have mortgaged our grandchildren’s’ future by double-digit trillions of deficit spending.

We will survive the current disaster, but what sort of landscape will emerge from the debris? The surviving companies will be leaner, tougher and aggressive. Learning to run lean without losing sales will be a challenge. One way to accomplish this is to outsource facets of an operation like sales lead generation/qualification, inbound call centers, database management and any other area that may be assigned to professional specialists. Outsourcing may be a tool that allows a company to focus their resources on those activities that produce business.