13. The Pirate List

Sometimes it’s tough to be more pirate when you’re lost in a spreadsheet, dying inside as you open another PowerPoint slide or watching your card get declined because you just quit your job for that world-changing dream, or because you’re actually doing the start-up thing and are learning the harsh reality that the hustle ain’t easy. There will be moments, days even, where you don’t think you can be more pirate. On days like these you need to dig down and find courage and look to other pirates for inspiration.

There are plenty of brilliant individuals, groups, organizations and communities who are already pirate-like in nature, operating on the edges of industries, seeking new ideas and inspiring new generations. Over the course of my career and the writing of this book I’ve come across thousands of pioneers who are trying to break rules and make better ones, who don’t seem scared to be different, and are trying to reorganize their worlds for the better.

I’ve taken the liberty of listing a few of my favourites, from Patreon to Taylor Swift. Hopefully they aren’t all obvious, but they all are using the pirate stages of change, and they are all operating by some kind of code of their own.

Use this list as you like. Check out one, check out none, or check out all of them. They are here to excite and motivate you to be more pirate, just when you think you can’t.

Quite deliberately in no particular order, and by no means intended to be exhaustive, here are twenty pirates to inspire you. For more, go to www.bemorepirate.com.

1. ESCAPE THE CITY got wise to the fact that smart people are starting to demand more than money from their jobs long before the global reports told us that people want to work in a place that has a purpose, and that we all work better when our work has a meaning. Escape the City started out as a newsletter of opportunities for bored City workers to apply their professional talents in paid roles but for organizations that made the world a better place. They soon became a reverse recruitment agency, saving great talent from being wasted in the financial sector and channelled it in service of a greater good.
2. PROFESSOR MUHAMMAD YUNUS came up with the world-changing idea of micro-finance when he decided to lend rather than give money to a woman he saw begging in the same place every day. On the back of such a big but simple idea he built Grameen, a super network of social businesses from fisheries to telecoms that lifted millions from poverty by giving them a fairer deal. On a mission to ‘put poverty in a museum’, Yunus’s fearlessness and frankness has landed him in serious trouble with his own Bangladeshi government but has also seen him win a Nobel Prize for Peace and create social business partnerships with brands from Danone to Adidas.
3. SOPHI TRANCHELL is in a league of her own. She founded Divine Chocolate back when a Fairtrade logo on food meant it cost more and tasted worse than its unfair alternatives. Sophie played the multitrillion chocolate industry at its own game and won. Not only did Sophi create an enviable brand that demanded shelf space in high-end retailers, she also conquered the fierce battleground of supermarket chains, all whilst ensuring that Ghanaian chocolate farmers owned and co-managed the company through a high degree of transparency and shared governance. Like a true pirate, Sophie’s success led directly to the chocolate-producing multinationals adopting Fairtrade suppliers; the navy took from the pirate.
4. SATOSHI NAKAMOTO in true pirate style remains anonymous; no one really knows the true identity of the inventor of the world’s first ‘crypto-currency’, and let’s be honest, no one really knows how it works either. But it does, and since its release in 2009 Bitcoin has had the world’s financial markets trembling in awe of a ‘decentralized currency’. With rules they don’t understand, with no country to whom it belongs, with only the citizens of the internet as its users, and with stock market valuations accelerating, its impact is set to create huge waves.
5. JERICHO CHAMBERS was set up by Captain Robert Phillips, aka Citizen Robert, as he calls himself on social media. Phillips walked out on his role as CEO of one of the world’s biggest public relations firms, Edelman, when he had an epiphany: PR was dead and the business model was broken. He didn’t just quit the industry, he declared it dead and buried, then published a book to make his point, Trust Me, PR is Dead and then, with ex-advertising executive and journalist Christine Armstrong, co-founded Jericho Chambers, a consultancy and think tank committed to the common good. Jericho calls itself ‘a community of experts, working together to deliver new programmes of communications, leadership and trust in the twenty-first century defined by activism networks to negotiate a future that is a more hopeful, open and tolerant world.’ Others call it the ‘antidote to McKinsey and WPP, the alternative the consultancy sector needs’.
6. PAM WARHURST started a revolution using food to change the way people live and learn when she launched Incredible Edibles in a small market town in the north of England. On spare land, in people’s gardens and even in front of the police station, Pam and her crew planted ‘propaganda gardening’ that changed a community’s relationship with food, nature and eventually itself. Pam and her vegetable pirates became an internet sensation and sparked a global movement when Pam’s TED talk inspired hundreds of communities to reclaim unused land and use it to educate, feed and inspire. There are now over 100 Incredible Edible groups in the UK and many more that span the world, radically repurposing land to grow vegetables in order to rebalance communities and their relationship with nature.
7. PATREON is a revolution for the individuals and organizations in the creative economy, for the first time enabling artists, makers and creators effectively to allow their audience to subscribe to their work, and pay nominal amounts in real time as they produce, rather than have to finance entire projects and productions themselves. It’s fast becoming one of the most important creative networks in the world; launched in 2013, within five years it had grown to a body of over 50,000 creatives collectively receiving $150 million in regular small instalments from a global audience of millions.
8. JAMAL EDWARDS was a teenager who started filming East London’s MCs from the grime scene. Seeking exclusive snippets of content and freestyle raps, he filmed at night, edited until morning, uploaded to YouTube and saw his following grow and grow until his platform became the number one site for any artist coming to the UK. Jamal eventually found himself on tour with Jay Z, appointed as the face of Google’s TV campaign, pictured on billboards and honoured by the Queen. All the time using his story and influence to create even bigger waves, Jamal inspired thousands of other young people to follow in his footsteps.
9. GIRL EFFECT was a simple idea with huge potential that, in the hands of some of the world’s greatest storytellers, rewrote the rulebook of international development. The Girl Effect argues that investing in girls in developing countries creates the greatest possible multiple of a return because it a) sidesteps the common dangers of corruption, b) is a genuine investment in the future, and c) empowers a group more usually overlooked and undervalued. Behind its success is the Nike Foundation, whose budgets and branding skills have allowed Girl Effect to disrupt the way traditional aid is being delivered.
10. TAYLOR SWIFT might seem to be an unlikely-looking buccaneer, but she is a pirate through and through. Rejecting the obvious record-industry route, Taylor is signed to a small-town label where she retains complete control of her career. With no industry machine to back her, she’s nevertheless amassed the clout to stand up to Apple and Spotify, and bring them both to heel. Her storytelling through song, content, social media and well-orchestrated gossip, vendettas and ‘feuds’ with everyone from Kanye West to Katy Perry means she’s routinely named on social media amongst the world’s most powerful figures.
11. WILEY (aka Eskiboy aka the UK Godfather of Grime) is an innovator, experimenter, agitator and street pirate. Wiley turned his back on the garage scene where he first made his name, strategically starting ‘beef’ with friends that turned into rivals and helped make him famous. But crucially he independently pioneered a brand-new sound, a sound that snapped the necks of a generation as he captured the mood and the moment of Britain and created something that went against everything. His influence and direct interference on many UK artists can be found from Ed Sheeran to Dizzee Rascal, but he himself remains steadfastly unreliable, notoriously difficult to work with and, in some ways, is now watching from the wings as the sound of grime he helped define has gone mainstream with its new stars being front-page news.
12. MEXICO CITY is one of the largest and oldest cities in the world. Beset by corruption and narco traffic, it is not the obvious centre of civic innovation, yet, defying immense odds, standing up to its challenges and breaking all the rules of a very traditionally Catholic country, that is exactly what it’s doing. Mexico City has engaged in one of the largest exercises in participatory democracy in the world, with citizens helping shape policy online, leading to breakthrough innovations in social policy from abortion on request to a limited form of legal euthanasia to no-fault divorce to same-sex marriage. It is also actively encouraging social enterprise communities, effecting transformation in education and taking a firm stance against corruption.
13. RESPONSIVE.ORG is a whole new way of organizing. It’s a manifesto for change that could affect every organization in the world, from Microsoft to Pepsi, to governments, charities, start-ups and multinationals. Responsive have published a manifesto for the next iteration of organizational theory, which they believe is going to be ‘self-organizing’. They advocate being ‘built to learn’ with rapid response mechanisms designed into how teams operate and process information and create work. They encourage experimentation and continuous improvement, and argue it’s achievable if we move to a new paradigm where employees and customers exist within the same network all aligned around a shared purpose. There might not be as many buzzwords in the future, but there will definitely be Responsive organizations.
14. MEU RIO is an awesome force giving real strength to the collective voice of Rio de Janeiro’s youth. With thousands and thousands of young people signed up, it’s a platform politicians can’t ignore, and since its launch in 2011 it has had some considerable wins, adding further to its reputation as a powerful network of youth. Blocking corrupt politicians, protecting a school from closure and preserving environmental policies in the city are amongst its triumphs so far. But its most considerable achievement is proving that an organized collaborative, participatory group of young people can change their world.
15. EDWARD SNOWDEN put more than his career on the line, risking a court martial and a long prison sentence when he turned whistle blower on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States of America (USA), telling the world that these organizations have got us all under surveillance – a fact they’d rather keep secret.
16. WIKILEAKS might have a founder more famous for allegations against his behaviour, but the work of the organization is what gets it a place on the list. Having become the go-to platform for sharing the truth when it’s too hot to handle, WikiLeaks has become a conduit between the whistle blowers the world needs to keep it accountable and the media whose job that’s supposed to be.
17. MATT PARKER AND TREY STONE broke and rewrote the rules with South Park, their anarcho-cartoon that broke the accepted boundaries of what was considered appropriate to laugh at. Their searing satire has everything in its sights from Jesus (regularly) to gender politics, cultural identities, politicians, big business and capitalism. There are few important aspects of society they haven’t somehow widened the lens on by making incredibly funny, incredibly crass jokes about them.
18. DEVELOPMENT MONITOR takes one of the toughest truths going and turns it into accessible data anyone in the world can use. All their robust and transparently collected evidence suggests the commonly held perception that international aid is beneficial to developing countries may well be based on bad maths. They calculate and demonstrate that, due to the bigger mechanisms of market forces, for every $1 put into a ‘developing country’ by another government’s charity or international development budget, usually the equivalent of $2 is extracted. There have been many calls for an improvement on the effectiveness of well-intentioned international development to innovate beyond any accusations of evolved colonialism. But it’s Development Monitor who are making the argument unignorable.
19. DON’T PANIC began life as a protest poster, given out in the dead of night to clubbers on their way home. They soon grew a cult following, and activist artists like Banksy and Shepard Fairey became their collaborators. Over two decades, Don’t Panic has rewritten its own rules and reinvented itself to stay close enough to the edges to be truly innovative, and close enough to the centre to influence great change. Their gripping campaign ‘Most Shocking Second a Day Video’ for Save the Children is the most watched charity video of all time, and their work for Greenpeace satirizing The Lego Movie on its release brought an end to a lifelong relationship between Lego and Shell Petroleum. They won a Bafta when they took their blend of comedy and commentary onto television and got into all manner of trouble trying to install a stained-glass window of Tony Blair into Tony Blair’s own home.
20. THE GUARDIAN NEWSPAPER was born with real pirate roots, when its founder, John Edward Taylor, read in The Times a biased report of workers’ riots he’d witnessed first hand. The idea for an impartial investigative newspaper came to him. Ever since, the Guardian has fought for those principles, its independence guaranteed by well-invested and well-protected financial reserves held in trust. The newspaper has acquired a global reputation for brave journalism and taken on anyone who gets in the way of telling an important story; many of the major game-changing news stories of the last few years have Guardian journalists behind them, from the Panama and the Paradise Papers, through to the infamous phone-hacking scandal across the Murdoch-owned media. In keeping with its journalistic ideals, the paper remains innovative in its business model, exploring ways to generate income that protect its independence and integrity. In 2017 it both launched an enterprise accelerator investing financially in new innovations, and garnered a record number of paying subscribers, with 800,000 readers around the world pledging to support the Guardian’s journalistic principles and approach.

You’ll find more examples of pirate-like pioneers and inspiring ideas on www.bemorepirate.com.