Following the runaway success of business sales and marketing success 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 sets in the inner pirate is a clear, easy-to-read guide to changing an unwieldy, traditional corporate model for a more elegant and successful Challenger culture. As such, the inner pirate it is a primer for anyone who has felt they could build something more out of their brand, were it not for the sometimes short-sighted demands of management or shareholders.

Although the concept of the Challenger business has become an established component of marketing jargon in recent times, it is worth reviewing Morgan’s own definition before delving further into it. the inner pirate. According to Morgan, a Challenger is a brand or company that positions itself in such a way that it successfully competes 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 inner pirate cares about the nuts and bolts of transforming into such a brand or business. Morgan does not assume that his reader is intimately familiar with eating the big fishinstead ensuring 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 inner pirate it 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, although exceptions do occur where Morgan seeks to help the reader implement a greater understanding of its benefits 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 ascription to the inner pirate is generally very successful. He begins by asking what attracts so many of us to the idea of ​​piracy – the freedom and dangers of life outside the box – and goes on to examine the factors that prevent us from embarking on such a career. These factors are summed up in what Morgan calls “The Six Excuses People Make for Staying in the Navy: Doing the Same Thing Everyone Else Has Always Done.”

At the same time, the inner pirate he intends to take Jobs’s statement one step further, arguing that it is possible to combine the two cultures of pirate and marine. Morgan accepts that while there will always be born ‘pirates’ like Jobs or Branson, most of us are far less comfortable with the idea of ​​trading security within an established company for the risks of business life as the captain of our own. . Boat. It’s a key idea, and indeed a flaw in the book is perhaps that Morgan could afford to be more explicit in his refutation of this ‘either/or’ mentality.

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

Be that as it may, the inclusion of the ‘personal’ is central to Morgan’s exposition: throughout the book, he makes it clear that such change cannot take place without significant engagement of the potential catalyst; both to his brand and to a potentially high degree of personal exposure. This is not a book that the reader can walk away with a couple of pithy sentences and an exercise or two, sure in his mind that he has thus done his business well. Instead, the inner pirate aims to help those of us who have longingly thought about shifting paradigms, breaking molds, and breaking parameters, but have little or no idea how to tackle 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 get something new. Interviews with the key people behind each example provide valuable insights, not only about the brands and businesses in question, but also about 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 inner pirate it’s a book that gives marketers from any industry or background a business vision to be proud of, and far less reason than ever before to justify abandoning it.