Following the runaway success of business sales success and marketing eating the big fishAdam Morgan has now brought us the next stage of his vision in The Pirate Inside – Building a Challenger brand culture within you and your organization.

What Morgan establishes in the pirate within is a clear, easy-to-read guide to shifting from a traditional, unwieldy corporate model to a sleeker, more successful Challenger culture. As such, the pirate within is a primer for anyone who has felt they could build something more out of their brand, were it not for the sometimes myopic demands of management or shareholders.

Although the concept of the Challenger business has become an established component of marketing jargon of late, it is worth reviewing Morgan’s own definition before delving further into it. the pirate within. According to Morgan, a Challenger is a brand or company that is positioned in such a way that it competes successfully against one or more clear market leaders, despite the inequity of its available resource. Furthermore, the Challenger accomplishes this by refusing to obey some or all of the traditional ‘rules’ of its category or market.

Where eating the big fish sought to detail the behavior and attitudes that belong to a successful Challenger, the pirate within is concerned with the practical aspects of transformation into such a brand or business. Morgan does not assume that his reader is intimately familiar with eating the big fishensuring instead that an analysis of processes and requirements is combined with a wide range of case studies to provide a step-by-step path for the reader to achieve the key aspects of a Challenger culture and attitude.

Having said this, the pirate within assumes that the reader knows enough about the advantages and disadvantages of the Challenger business model to recognize its value to their business. As such, the book spends little time extolling the virtues of a Challenger approach per se, though exceptions do occur where Morgan seeks to help the reader implement a greater understanding of the benefits of it within his own organization. .

The book’s title is taken from a comment made by Steve Jobs during an interview that said, “It’s more fun being a pirate than joining the Navy.” Although Morgan could sometimes be accused of working the metaphor too forcefully, his affiliation to the pirate within it is generally very successful. He begins by asking what draws so many of us to the idea of ​​hacking—the freedom and dangers of living off the beaten path—and goes on to examine the factors that keep us from embarking on that career path. These factors are summed up in what Morgan calls: “The six excuses people make to stay in the Navy: doing what everyone else has always done.”

At the same time, the pirate within he intends to take Jobs’ statement a step further, arguing that it is possible to combine the two cultures of pirate and sailor. Morgan accepts that while there will always be born ‘hacks’ like Jobs or Branson, most of us are much less comfortable with the idea of ​​changing security within a company established by the risks of corporate life like the captain of ours. . ship. It’s a key idea and indeed a flaw in the book is perhaps that Morgan could afford to be more explicit in his rebuttal of this ‘either/or’ mentality.

A primary concept within the pirate within it’s that success for a brand like Challenger depends on its people embracing a new ‘personal and cultural model’. At this point, it is worth digressing to note that, throughout the book, Morgan insists that we view such action as: “the deliberate move from a less suitable and successful model… to one that is more appropriate to the opportunity for the brand.” Even pirates, it seems, have some rules.

Be that as it may, the inclusion of the ‘personal’ is central to Morgan’s account: throughout the book, he makes it clear that such change cannot take place without significant engagement from the potential catalyst; both to his brand and to a potentially high degree of personal exposure. This is not a book from which the reader can walk away with a couple of pithy sentences and an exercise or two, secure in his mind that he has thus done his business well. Instead, the pirate within is intended to help those of us who have longedly thought about paradigm-shifting, mold-breaking, and parameter-breaking, but have little to no idea how to approach such violent activities.

To answer that question, Morgan has included case studies from both the UK and the US, drawn from a diverse selection of industries. In doing so, he makes sure that all but the most widely read of us walk away with something new. Interviews with the key personnel behind each example provide valuable insight, not only about the brands and businesses in question, but also the personalities who are drawn to offer such engagement with them.

If nothing else, even the most jaded readers should enjoy the anecdotes and lessons provided by some of these industry leaders, proving that even the best business minds haven’t always had an easy road. For the rest of us the pirate within is a book that gives marketers in any industry or background an entrepreneurial vision to be proud of, and far less reason than before to justify abandoning it.