I spoke at the Remote Deposit Capture Summit in Orlando today. One of the individuals that had agreed to read my book in advance and provide a review was Jim DeBello, CEO of Mitek. Mitek has revolutionized the art of capturing images of source documents and converting them into payments (ie: using your mobile phone to make a deposit at your bank). They have numerous patents, and it’s a pretty good bet that if you make a mobile remote deposit today, you are using some form of Mitek intellectual property to do so.
But Jim is not just a great CEO of a great company — he is also a sailor. He lives in the San Diego area (hello, what a great sailing locale!) and has his own sailboat. Although I have not yet had the occasion to get out on the water with Jim, we talk about it every time we see each other. Since I live on the East Coast, it has not yet aligned for me to hook up for a sailing outing when I am in Southern California. On this occasion, I was giving him an autographed copy of Grounded and thanking him for his review and quote on the book.
We naturally got to talking about sailing, and we jointly came up with two observations:
1) There is a significant part of the U.S. that does not have access to “blue water” sailing, which is sailing in a large body of water (think the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico). While there are many lakes that are large enough for sailing, there is a big difference in lake sailing and open water (blue water) sailing. The Great Lakes would count as open water. Basically, when you are blue water sailing, there is no land in sight, and you are subject to the weather and numerous other conditions that are outside of your control.
2) Blue water sailing brings inherent opportunities for dealing with crises. Sailing, in general, wherever it occurs, does have inherent risk, but if you are sailing 100 yards off the shore of a lake and your sailboat is going down, you can swim to shore. That is not an option in open water. With quickly changing weather, submerged items that can sink your boat (I once came within ten feet of hitting a submerged concrete piling that was bobbing up and down just waiting to eat a boat hull), the idiocy of other boaters, equipment failures, mechanical failures, and so on, things can turn from wonderful to bad, and bad to disastrous in minutes.
So, as it turns out, there is a significant number of the US population that has a desire to sail, but doesn’t have the opportunity. Either they are not close to where there is open water sailing, or the cost is prohibitive (or both). If they were able to go out sailing, there would be innumerousGrounded learning lessons in the process. This got me thinking that it would be great to combine a Grounded leadership workshop with open water sailing. I would take three or four current or future leaders, and we would go to a great origin point for sailing, like the Florida Keys, San Diego, or even perhaps the BVIS or Belize. We would spend a week on a luxury sailboat and the participants would learn how to sail and, in that process, also go through a Grounded workshop specifically oriented to prepare us to make good decisions and exhibit leadership when disaster strikes.
Don’t get me wrong: it would be a lot of fun. Couldn’t you envision yourself at the helm of this?
That looks like a pretty good classroom environment to me. So if improving your leadership and decision-making skills while learning how to sail out on the water for a week sounds interesting to you, send me an email atdavid@davidpeterson.com and let me know about your interest. I will be putting together at least one trip for 2017 and am looking for an inexperienced crew. How about you join me?