Dear Friends:
I’m convinced that most performing magicians aren’t fully aware of the very real power of our magic. Far beyond its ability to entertain, magic can help us shift our audiences’ attitudes and beliefs. The lessons we learn when we learn magic can be applied in many different areas of our lives. This month’s Museletter features some profound thoughts of how this works from our good friend David Morey. If you’ve attended Magic & Meaning or one of our Master Classes in Mentalism, you probably already know David and his work. If not, let me enlighten you about some of David’s qualifications.
Chairman and CEO of DMG Global and Vice Chairman of Core Strategy Group, David is one of America’s leading strategic consultants. He is the award-winning co-author of The Underdog Advantage (McGraw Hill), and has helped add hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and value to a wide range of Fortune 500 companies. Mr. Morey has worked with some of the world’s top business leaders—and with five Nobel Peace Prize winners and eighteen winning global presidential campaigns. He is also an accomplished magical performer.
Along with Eugene Burger and former acting head of the CIA, John McLaughlin, David has written a new book, due out next month, about how the lessons we learn from magic can translate to other areas of our lives, and particularly to business. Here is David Morey:
“Explains how thinking like a magician can take you and your endeavors to new heights of success.â€
–from the foreword by David Copperfield.
We three authors have been mixing this magical broth for almost a decade, and the book is dedicated to our dear teacher, mentor, and friend, Eugene Burger, who moved to what he himself called the “ultimate capital M Mystery of life†while this work was nearing completion. But let us be clear: This is not Eugene’s last book or final chapter, because his voice from these pages is as enduring as are his teachings.
All three of us came to write this book through magic—but we all are more than magicians: a political and corporate strategist, a world-renowned magical thinker and philosopher, and the former acting director of the CIA. Our mission: Apply to the strategic innovation of business, everything we know about magic—as we say in the introduction:
“In writing this book, our objective is not to create a new generation of magicians, but to publish in one place and for the first time, the Creating Business Magic strategies of the world’s greatest magicians—to use the force and metaphor of magic to empower boundless imagination, drive leadership, and create success in your business, your career, and your future. At the core of this book is the belief that imagination can make magicians of us all.â€
Over 50 years ago, consulting legend Peter Drucker said: “Business has only two functions: marketing and innovation.†And the magician inside us all brings to marketing and innovation—and to life itself—untapped magical strategies, magical synergies, and magical powers.
The magician’s magical powers include the ability to understand perception, drive aspiration, fuel imagination, anticipate change, direct attention, bolster persuasion, grab the dialogue, and empower belief. Our book shows how using magic as metaphor and applying the principles of conjuring can challenge assumptions and empower imagination to:
“Creating Business Magic” takes the reader along a path of genuinely magical thinking. Beginning with imagination, the authors illuminate the power of perception, ways to innovate, to think out of the box, break down conceptual barriers, and finally bring out the magician inside us all. These are the essential ingredients of every powerful magic performance, and here the authors take you behind the scenes in magic to explain how thinking like a magician can move you into new realms of imagination, creativity, and accomplishment.â€
Our idea of synergizing magic and business is inspired by Albert Einstein’s wonderful quote: “imagination is more important than knowledge.†This, in fact, is fuel that drives our core argument—that imagination is the secret source of all magic and all magicians, and that imagination has driven progress and breakthrough across the ages. Imagination invented the wheel, imagination created the information revolution, and imagination just sent an unmanned spacecraft all the way to Pluto.
We magicians know that the real magic happens well before any show begins—in the way we learn, prepare, practice, rehearse, disrupt, experiment, and strategize. This is the real magic of any magical performance, just as it is the real magic of any innovation, any business, or the conquering of any of life’s challenges.
Our book, then, is a tribute to the magician inside us all—because our inner magician is so very and increasingly important today. As we write:
“For every one of us, the way of magic is the way of slow movement along a path of growing and learning to be a magician. Whatever philosophical beliefs you hold, accept this book as an argument for “fideism,†for empowering your own beliefs. In the case of the authors, these are the beliefs of the magician. Believing in what you do, say, and live is the ultimate calling of your inner magician. “I have something wonderful to show you tonight,†was co- author Eugene Burger’s favorite pre-show mantra. So it should be for all of us. We all have something wonderful to show you tonight.â€
We magicians have so many wonderful things to show you tonight: So many wonderful ways—in and out of business—to help put to work innovation, invention, and imagination. This is our inner magician’s real secret. It is, more than ever, a secret we need today in business and in leadership. This is the secret of the magician inside us all—the remarkable power of our imagination.