Welcome to a series on the business implications of great landmarks in the arts and popular culture. As a team, we continually share our thoughts about all the books, films and TV we’re watching and reading. It dawned on us recently that we’re often seeing parallels between all these cultural things and our day jobs. So, we’re joining the dots in this series and actively thinking about what we can learn in our lives, in business, branding, research and marketing from the cultural events that we’re immersed in.

Forth in line is Martin and going big…

We live in an era of limited ambition. What we do not do is rampage across the face of the globe the way our forefathers did. We do not swashbuckle and sally forth across the oceans without reliable compasses or a good measurement of longitude. Google Maps has seen to that. We don’t even launch into space the way we did in the 60s and 70s.

It’s not just exploration. Consider our own day jobs in business and brand expression. The grand sweep is not there, the swagger is absent. You don’t read the brief that has that gleam in its eye, the wild, crazed intent to sweep everything before it. Oh no, for it’s been through the icy chill of Compliance; it’s got share targets in it; customer segmentation information; market analysis. The typical brief is a triumph of risk aversion and modest ambition.

Enter stage centre Herman Melville, with his unfeasibly heroic novel Moby Dick. That beard! No pitiful goatee for Herman. Those faraway eyes, lost somewhere in the roiling South Pacific fisheries. Already we are in the company of epic scale and grandeur.

The plot is simple. Captain Ahab, a whaler of 40 years standing, receives a commission to take the whaling ship the Pequod on a conventional three-year commercial voyage. But unbeknownst to the owners, he has his own mission – to find and kill Moby Dick, the white sperm whale and fabled terror of the seven seas. Ahab’s last encounter with the famed leviathan resulted in the whale biting his leg off, and he is bent on revenge. With messianic zeal and through sheer force of his demonic personality, he bends the whole crew to his desire. And so the scene is set. Read on.

The book is ill-structured, majestic, maddening, inspiring, often boring, beautifully written, overlong, sensitive, soaring and, crucially, unforgettable. In forty years of reading books, it’s one of the few to have imprinted itself in my mind and heart. How come? Melville knew.

‘To produce a mighty book, you must have a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea.’

You can see what he was getting at. Think of it this way: sailor receives orthodox fishing brief, which, had he fulfilled it in the expected manner, would have been nothing more than a footnote in a dusty maritime log. We would have had no immortal classic; no powerful rumination on the boundary between madness and sanity; no iconic metaphor for ill-conceived danger; no stirring adventure yarn with a cast of extraordinary characters and less provocation for writers, artists or even businesspeople to think on a vast canvas. And not even Gregory Peck lashed to the side of Moby Dick in John Huston’s 1956 movie adaptation.

Let’s hear it for boldness

And so to us, lashed to our desks by briefs and deadlines. How Ahab-like are we prepared to be? Or are we happy to live in this world of limited ambition? An advertisement leading to some sales. A brand experiencing an upward blip in its tracking after a short campaign. No! Rise up, be better than that, have more desire for the stature of our work. The message of Moby Dick is that ambitious greatness that falls short is always more interesting, more memorable, more stirring, than a perfectly realised miniature.

Where’s our harpoon?

Martin