Boomerang

If you’ve been around more than a random seven years in marketing and have worked with big companies, you’ve heard ‘em all say, “Oh we can’t do that! It’s like turning the Queen Mary! It’ll take forever. No, it’s impossible.”

Yet, in our very own spectacular San Francisco Bay, they turned the Queen Mary - the Queen Mary 2.0 that is. Beautifully did she turn, with a navigational margin for error of less than 70 feet and just 28 feet worth of clearance under the Golden Gate Bridge. (And if you don’t know our Bay, it’s grounded many vanity toys of far less consequence.)

So I grabbed my camera and headed to the bay to see it for myself (photo above). Cuz frankly, I am super sick of hearing that cliché.

But Captain Tom Miller, for whom docking the ship was “the challenge of a lifetime,” modestly said that while she was big and heavy, “she’s a good ship and maneuvers well with all the latest technology.”

Isn’t that like the best companies in the world? They might have started out like the original Queen Mary, near impossible to turn, but they reinvent themselves using new technology, often a modest, new captain, and hopefully end up as light on their feet as our new grande dame the QM2.

So the next time I stare down a bunch of nay sayers whether they’re in start up chaos or orderly corporate sterility, I will channel the spirit of Cap’n Tom. Because yo’… I know that dame can turn.