Creating Business Magic. David Morey
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on their table? They know, by memory, precisely where every item is. All the magician needs to do is reach, never once looking away from the audience.
The stage is large. But magicians choreograph every move across it. They have thought through in theatrical terms every action and each event, no matter how small or apparently insignificant. Everything, they know, everything communicates, and the objective is to be several steps ahead of the audience at every step. The “miracle” the people are about to see has effectively already occurred—in the thought devoted to it, in the preparation for it.
Understanding how a magician plans spontaneity will help you plan the “spontaneity” of your next pitch, negotiation, criminal investigation, presentation, lesson, business consultation, marketing analysis, or design. We know it will, because all three of us use what we’ve learned from magic for purposes such as these all the time. By the same token, learning how great magicians stay steps ahead of their audience will help you to imagine how you can stay steps ahead of your competition, and even more important, ahead of the customers and clients you serve.
Great magicians are masters at analyzing their audience. They climb into their point of view. They create precisely the perception they want and that they understand the audience wants to perceive. And, having come into the performance steps ahead of the audience, they never let them catch up. They create empathy with their audience, and they adjust their approach by picking up the feedback continually sent to them via audience facial expressions, applause (or its absence), gasps, laughter, the collective intake and expulsion of breath, and (above all) silence. They work the audience as expertly as they manipulate the props they bring with them onstage, and they think ahead to how they might still achieve a successful outcome even if a trick goes badly wrong. The magic business is, in one respect, exactly like every other enterprise. It is a business of people—of understanding and anticipating wants, needs, desires, contingencies, and perceptions, and of using this understanding and anticipation to create delight and satisfaction.
A great magician once said that any good magic trick is performed three times. It is performed first when the magician “does” it. It is performed again when a member of the audience remembers it. And it is performed yet a third time when that audience member tells someone else about it. In this way, magic is like any truly valuable and valued product or service. It converts consumers into advocates, proselytizers, and champions. It creates followers.
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The English word magician is derived from the Latin magus, usually translated as “magician,” or more specifically, “learned magician”—hence the three magi in the Nativity story: “wise men.” The Latin word is derived from the Greek magos, which the Greeks applied to any member of the ancient Persian learned and priestly caste.
Before it became magician, the Latin magus was anglicized as mage. It is difficult to ignore the fact that mage lacks but one vowel to become image. As a noun, image came into English from Old French early in the thirteenth century and referred at that time to any statue or painting or any other artificial visual representation of a person or a thing. As a verb, image debuted in our language later, toward the end of the fourteenth century, when it referred to the formation of a mental picture—that is, to “image” an image in the imagination. That last word, imagination, is also of fourteenth-century origin in English, derived from Old French imaginación, meaning a mental picture, a concept, even a hallucination, an “imagining.”
Through all these etymological transformations, the core remains unchanged. From the beginning and always, magic and imagination share the same central syllable. And it is hardly an accident that they do.
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.
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
—Albert Einstein
Scene: This really happened1 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTxGC1OiWFs). It’s the mid-1970s, and Doug Henning is re-energizing magic with his own form of magical wonder. He walks onto a Broadway stage, his pants one of those strange 1970s colors, and he’s holding a newspaper, reading it, and turning to the audience: “The only thing a magician really does is to ask one question: ‘What’s real, and what’s illusion?’”
Henning pages through the newspaper and says: “Now, the illusion begins. I call this an illusion because I never actually tear the newspaper at all.” He rips the paper in half, and again, and again, and again, five times in total. Each time you see and hear the newspaper tear. “In fact, some people even come back stage after the show.” Henning admits. “And they say: I could have sworn you tore that newspaper…. But they’ve been deceived, because I haven’t actually torn the paper at all…. You can’t trust your senses. You don’t believe me?” “Oh, look!” Henning instantly restores the entire newspaper! Or did he ever tear it at all? The audience gasps and claps, but still Henning’s question runs in their mind: “What’s real, and what’s illusion?” 2
This is the same question a now famous “scientific and experimental film about perception” inspires. You may have seen it: Three people in white shirts and three in black pass a basketball back and forth. Viewers are asked to count how many times the players wearing white pass
the ball. When the short film is over, audience members argue amicably over the number. Fourteen? Thirteen? Fifteen? Not one of them, however, comments on the man, dressed in an absurd gorilla costume, who strolls back and forth through the frame, even pausing to pound his fake gorilla chest. They are all “victims” of what psychologists call “inattentional blindness.” Asked to count basketball passes, basketball passes are all they perceive. Asked whether Doug Henning is really tearing the newspaper, seeing and tearing the newspaper is all they perceive. As the saying goes, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.3
The hair of Mad Men’s Don Draper was reality from the late 1920s though at least half of the 1960s. If you watched cable television anytime between 2007 and 2015, you are intimately familiar with the thick, slick, shoe-polish black hair of actor Jon Hamm as the 1950s-1960s Madison Avenue ad man: unbearably handsome, impeccably stylish, and so thoroughly put together that not a single follicle or shaft was ever out of place. Never mind Don’s tortured, alcohol-soaked psyche, that hair was the apotheosis of Euro-American manhood—and had been since the third decade of the twentieth century. For at least two or three overlapping generations, this tonsorial state was not only reality, but a very desirable form of the status quo.
In truth, human hair does not naturally assume such a sleek, shiny, and shellacked shape on the human skull. From the hairline up, the reality of the Don Draper look was real, but unnatural—and for good reason. It was manufactured at the County Chemicals Chemico Works, Bradford Street, Birmingham, England. The plant was owned and operated by Beecham, Ltd.—establishing its place in the world by turning out, beginning in 1842, Beecham’s Pills, a concoction of aloe, ginger, and soap advertised to “Dislodge Bile, Stir up the Liver, Cure Sick-Headache, Female Ailments, Remove Disease and Promote Good Health.” It almost certainly did none of these, but the undeniable reality was that Beecham’s Pills were one hell of a laxative, managing to keep British bowels in