Everything I need to know about life I learned from Star Trek

Leadership, the final frontier. These are the examples of the Star Trek captains whose mission was to seek out new methods, to teach management lessons, and to boldly lead where few managers have gone before. Invisible forces, alien invaders, and  magnetic storms are all common challenges to the captains of the various ships in the Star Trek universe. 

Managers face their equivalents every day and, while it might be desirable to have Scotty beam you out of danger, it is never that simple.  

However, managers can learn lessons from the Star Trek captains and how they dealt with different situations.          

Why do we love James T. Kirk so?

Because the Good Captain is one of us.

As the new Star Trek film prepares to look at the temperamental Kirk’s youth and his rise in Starfleet, it’s worth examining the character’s durability. Frontiersman, lover, friend, flawed rebel, workaholic, philosopher, cowboy with a conscience — Kirk connects with many of society’s ideals of leadership and adventurer. He is who we’d like to be as leaders, or who we’d like to have lead us — and not just when he’s bedding a bevy of space aliens.

Youths learn leadership

“If you want to change someone’s behavior, you have to change their minds,” said [Ron McMillan], who took points from his New York Times best-seller “Influencer: The Power to Change Anything.” “You have to change how they see things and what they think is good.”

He said changing someone’s mind is a two-step process:

1. Convince the person they are capable of altering their behavior

Give the person motivation. To drive his point home with the high school students, McMillan quoted “Star Trek” character Mr. Spock’s quick-witted reply to Captain Kirk’s query about a Klingon warship that wasn’t responding. “I’ve analyzed it carefully,” Spock said. “They are either unable to respond, or they don’t want to.”

“I’ve traveled over 100,000 miles visiting influential leaders all over the world — Africa, Thailand, San Francisco,” he said.

“The No. 1 way leaders all over the world are changing people’s minds is verbal persuasion.”

Good followers make good leaders.

The Lone Ranger and Captain Kirk could hardly have functioned without their followers. [Spock] and Tonto were not mindless servants. They knew their place, yet pushed their leaders’ boundaries. They eliminated blind spots. Spock’s logic offset Kirk’s intuition. Kirk had so much faith in Spock that he wouldn’t hesitate to beam down to a planet and leave Spock in charge. The Lone Ranger’s daring came from the assurance that Tonto would rescue him from tight spots.

  So little attention has been paid to followership that followers are failing, says John Miller, author of QBQ! The Question Behind the Question, who preaches accountability.

If workers believe that leadership is the only important asset, then it becomes OK to lay dormant waiting for some prince of a boss to wake them with the kiss of inspiration. That’s a fairy tale, setting up followers who blame, complain, and procrastinate when the boss is imperfect.

“One small detail:      There aren’t any leaders without followers.”

Is the Star Trek style invisibility cloak finally a reality?

London, Feb 2 (ANI): You have seen it in movies – cloaks that make people disappear when they wear them – but it seems that invisibility cloaks have finally entered the real world.

University of Birmingham researchers have managed to make an entire paper clip invisible – an object thousands of times bigger than previous experiments.

They performed this extraordinary feat using naturally forming crystal called calcite, which has extraordinary light bending abilities. When placed over an object it “bounces” light around it, turning the object totally invisible to the naked eye.

”This is a huge step forward as, for the first time, the cloaking area is rendered at a size that is big enough for the observer to ‘see’ the invisible object with the naked eye,” the Telegraph quoted Dr. Shuang Zhang as saying.

“By using natural crystals for the first time, rather than artificial meta-materials, we have been able to scale up the size of the cloak and can hide larger objects, thousands of times bigger than the wavelength of the light.” (below – invisibility cloaks – Harry Potter and Star Trek)

‘Don’t let them promote you. Don’t let them transfer you. Don’t let them do anything that takes you off the bridge of that ship, because while you’re there … you can make a difference.”

Those words come from the lips of Captain James T. Kirk–directed at one of his successors in the Starship Enterprise’s command chair. But the final few words can easily be applied to the character himself.

Kirk did make a difference — but not only in space, the final frontier. He created a cultural imprint that has left us with everything from T-shirt catchphrases (“beam me up”) and real-world leadership ideals.

As the new Star Trek film prepares to look at the temperamental Kirk’s youth and his rise in Starfleet, it’s worth examining the character’s durability. Frontiersman, lover, friend, flawed rebel, workaholic, philosopher, cowboy with a conscience — Kirk connects with many of society’s ideals of leadership and adventurer. He is who we’d like to be as leaders, or who we’d like to have lead us — and not just when he’s bedding a bevy of space aliens.

Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry initially crafted the character as a homage to C. S. Forester’s cunning and duty-minded sea captain Horatio Hornblower. And Shatner himself once said he tried to imbue Kirk with a sense of the witty “good-pal-the-captain, who in the time of need could snap to become the warrior.”

With 28-year-old Chris Pine set to inherit sci-fi’s ultimate captaincy in the J. J. Abrams Trek prequel (with Jimmy Bennett also playing Kirk as an impetuous child), Kirk is poised for reinvention to an old  generation of fans, while simultaneously being introduced to a new one.

One of the reasons Kirk plays so well in North America is that he’s the ultimate frontiersman — a future-era Davy Crockett wrestling Klingons instead of bears. Born in Iowa, Kirk moves from humble beginnings to become the ultimate explorer — part astronaut, part larger-than-life sea captain unafraid of falling off the edges of the known world.

The Last Lecture creator Randy Pausch said watching Kirk taught him to be a better teacher, coworker, and family man while noting Kirk’s strength was found in delegating, inspiring, and establishing a vision — even though he wasn’t always the smartest member of the crew (that was generally Spock).

Modern men can use “going to war” as an excuse for a tryst, but Kirk could use everything from “won’t be back in this solar system for another 40 years” to “battling a Vulcan to death in hand-to-hand combat tomorrow” to justify his escapades. Life was short, and he flew by the seat of his pants in more ways than one.

Of course, Kirk was just as much a fighter as he was a lover. Despite all the technology at his fingertips, nearly every episode of the original series involved a campy fistfight producing a ripped, abs-revealing captain’s uniform (it’s a wonder Kirk’s tailor’s bill didn’t bankrupt Starfleet). His fighting style has been widely derided and even coined Kirk Fu (also Shat Fu) — a combat strategy “in which you can defeat someone without actually hitting any vulnerable spots” whose signature moves included the “Kirk drop kick” (which typically left the good captain on the ground along with his opponent).

Friendship and loyalty are also at the heart of Kirk’s appeal — the series linchpin is his friendship with Spock and Dr. McCoy, a Three Musketeers-esque loyalty that went beyond duty and ship.

“I thought you said men like us don’t have families,” McCoy once told Kirk. The captain’s typically over-dramatically-delivered response: “I. Was. Wrong.”

Since his debut in the 1960s, Kirk has arguably become the most parodied sci-fantasy character in history. And it’s the public’s — both Trek fans and non-fans alike — familiarity with the character that lend him to such mockery. We truly hurt the ones we love. Among the long list of those who have targeted the captain: The Simpsons, Family Guy, Saturday Night Live, National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon, Galaxy Quest and Futurama, and even Shatner himself in a famous SNL sketch in which he derides his famous role and tells a room full of Trek fans to “Get a life.”

The Communicator:  Many of the devices we saw decades ago are now available for use in the real world; we thank the engineers who made real these ten Star Trek technologies.   The Tricorder  Many of the inventors of the technologies we now find indispensable admit they were inspired by first seeing the futuristic gadgets in the hands of Captain Kirk and pointy-eared Mr. Spock on Star Trek.  Forty years ago the first episode of the television space fantasy was broadcast to millions of viewers. To everyone’s surprise, its impact on our planet has been as great as if we really had encountered spaceship riding aliens.  The creators of the cellular phone, personal computer, Magnetic Imaging Resonance (MRI) scanner, and even top NASA engineers and scientists all acknowledge the role Star Trek played in the birth of their technological advances.  One such gadget was the famous “communicator” William Shatner was always speaking into while playing the role of the dashing Captain James T. Kirk. The communicator allowed Kirk to give orders to his ship or crewmates from great distances. 

   Communicators are devices used for voice communication in the Star Trek fictional universe. They allow direct contact between individuals or via a ship’s communication system. To answer the device, you just flipped it open and started talking. Of course, everyone recognizes this device today as a cell phone.   Today, chatting on a mobile phone is commonplace, but back in the late Sixties, the only way to make a call was to use a phone plugged into the wall.

The medical tricorder is used by doctors to help diagnose diseases and collect bodily information about a patient; when Enterprise crew members became sick, Dr. McCoy was able to diagnose the problem in record time, usually thanks to his medical tricorder. Today’s physicians make use of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and CAT scans in much the same way. For smaller bugs, NASA has actually tested a similar kind of device on the space station. The LOCAD-PTS is able to detect and identify within minutes environmental pathogens (fungi or bacteria) that could adversely affect the health of crew members.  Below are other technological advances depicted in real-life today inspired by Star Trek.