Business by Design

Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC posted a blog titled: "How to Innovate Like Captain Jack Sparrow". Mike Figliuolo makes mention of a few different reasons why we should look to Jack Sparrow as an example of a good innovator. Jack Sparrow is one who forgets rules. He isn't tied down by meeting the expectations of others. For him, everything is in play. When there are no boundaries to your discovery for solutions, there are lots of incredible things that can happen. Mike also makes mention that Captain Jack does encounter failures, but that is how innovation works, there is a tremendous amount of work that goes into innovating, but that just makes a real solution become that much more successful.

The next thing that Mike makes mention of is to not overlook the simple solutions. Frequently during the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, Jack Sparrow is forced to come up with a plan on the spot. He uses the things that he has readily available, and he usually comes out on top. We can do more with the things we have than we think.

Finally, Mike talks about how important it is to experiment, and he gives an example:

"When Captain Jack fights Barbossa over Cortez's gold, he gives being cursed a try. He steals a piece of gold to see if it too will make him an immortal skeleton pirate zombie (which is awesome). Had he been wrong and the curse didn't work, he would have been dead when Barbossa ran him through with his cutlass.

Instead, he became immortal and was able to compete with a competitor who was initially much better positioned to win.

It was a risk. He experimented. Something cool happened. When was the last time you experimented? Try something new just to see what will happen. Many times our hypotheses and the conventional wisdom are wrong."

I agree with the things Mike talked about. Even though it's just a movie, and we shouldn't need to be innovating in quite the same way Captain Jack does, there are still things we can learn from it.

Here's where I read from: http://thoughtleadersllc.blogspot.com/2011/04/how-to-innovate-like-captain-jack.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ThoughtleadersLlcBlog+%28thoughtLEADERS+Blog%29