Let’s discuss how business has evolved over the course of humankind.
Interestingly, the evolution of business matches very closely with the standard stages of evolution that we discuss on this site.
There is a very simple reason for this: the stages of hunter-gatherer to horticultural to agrarian to industrial to informational appeared as a result of humans changing their primary mode of subsistence. And from one perspective, business is just all the activities associated with our primary mode of subsistence (AKA survival).
Sure, if you live in a modern country, you might not immediately associate business with that, because our survival is pretty much guaranteed. You might associate business with skyscrapers, modern offices, shiny adverts and electronic transactions. But realise that this is all part of our new, advanced mode of surviving, of subsisting. Without it, we’d have to do something else!
Anyways, we’ve discussed the previous modes of subsistence (read: business) in some depth. We went from wandering in the wilderness, scraping out our survival by hunting wild animals and gathering what we could, to basic cultivation of crops and livestock, to advanced cultivation of crops and livestock, to systematised, industrialised mass production, to electronic, computer-heavy, information-based business.
What we clearly observe during this process is the phenomenon of occupational specialisation, which in simple terms means that over time, professions multiply and become more specific.
In pre-civilisation, all humans dedicated themselves to hunting and gathering, even the leaders of the groups or tribes. There was very little occupational specialisation.
But with the advent of horticulture and agriculture, the increase of economic surplus, and the complexifying of human societies, fewer humans were required to dedicate all their time to mere subsistence., and more were required to take on other roles.
This phenomenon has eventually produced all the professions (and business) that we have today. It would be a formidable task to list all the professions in a modern country.
You’d have to include tradesmen, lawyers, accountants, web specialists (including web design, SEO, product teams, marketers, legal, and more), drivers, designers, salespeople, teachers, engineers, customer service representatives, HR people… AND all the sub- and sub-sub-specialisations involved in every single profession.
Ponder the fact that all modern professions are just the result of thousands of years of human evolution, of our economy dividing and subdividing itself endlessly, branching off into all kinds of niches and professions from its most fundamental starting point of getting food in our mouths, and you have a solid big-picture understanding of how we got here.
And yes, your current profession, even if you go to a fancy office, drink coffee, and spend your days on a computer and making calls, is also just an end result of all that evolution. You may not realise it, but you’re in the information age, using information to subsist, rather than crops, animals and industrial machinery.