The Fourth Strategy: Disorganize Innovation
THE FOURTH STRATEGY: DISORGANIZE INNOVATION
“There’s something about the center of any bureaucracy— it’s as if the water tastes different there….”
—Robert Shapiro
Scene: This really happened. We are in the suburban Las Vegas home of Jeff McBride, one of the best magicians in the world today. Gathered here are some of the other top American magicians, taking a five-day Master Class sponsored by the world’s most famous magic school. In the desert heat, this select group comes together to hear lectures, try out new material, and endure more-or-less polite critiques. Most of all, they create new ideas in a professional magicians’ equivalent of the experimental “Skunk Works” that legendary aircraft designer Kelly Johnson led for Lockheed—where he and his crew developed the likes of WWII’s war-winning P-38 Lightning fighter, the Cold War’s U-2 spy plane, and the SR-71 Blackbird, still the fastest aircraft ever built. Or think of it as akin to Steve Jobs’ famed “Mac Group,” set up in a Cupertino, California, strip mall, physically separate from official Apple HQ and topped by a Jolly Roger pirate flag. It was the perfect place to imagine and build a computer that shifted the PC paradigm.
Today, imaginations are fired up inside an unassuming desert home, the very environment in which McBride synthesized the shamanistic roots of magic to create a totally new effect: The Water Bowl Illusion. (Ultimately, on September 7, 2017, this is the effect that will fool Penn & Teller on their Fool Us television show.)
Take your mind outside the suburban house and into a great Vegas showroom. There, onstage, eerily lit from above, dressed as a shaman from an earlier age, McBride displays two metal bowls, obviously empty. Suddenly, in response to an ancient musical call, he looks up, appealing to the gods of water for their bounty. After all, he and his audience are in the middle of a desert.
He asks, he prays. And the water comes, filling both bowls. He drinks, drinks it all, and then shows the bowls, now dry.
McBride asks for more. Again, the bowls fill. He drinks. They fill again . . . again . . . and yet again. It seems too much. Yet the bowls fill again. And again. A thankful McBride accepts at long last the final drops. He says nothing, but the audience understands. The magic of life is good.
(The lights go out: Cut to black.)
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