I met Captain Picard in the mid-1990s. Star Trek: The Next Generation aired on Star Plus in India. Often at odd hours. No replay.
I missed many episodes. I saw enough to stay hooked.
What I admired most was the man. Steady. Fair. Never loud. Over the years I found he had also taught me a few things about running a company.
Here are the ones I still use.
1. Listen first. Then decide.
Picard rarely decided alone.
He turned to his crew. “Number One?” “Mr. Data?” “Counselor?” He heard each view out.
Then he said, “Make it so.”
Both halves matter. Skip the listening and you decide blind. Skip the deciding and you freeze. I wrote about the freezing half in What Captain Kirk can teach founder CEOs. Picard is the other half.
2. If they don’t get you, tell a story
In “Darmok”, Picard meets a race that speaks only in metaphor. Their words are references to their own stories. Plain language fails.
He bridges the gap by telling the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Founders hit this wall often. A team, a customer or an investor just doesn’t get it. So we explain louder. We add more slides.
The answer may be a shared story, not a better argument.
I learnt this the hard way. When I let ChatGPT expand the outline of one of my talks, it came back polished but generic. It only came alive when I went back to my own stories.
3. Build a crew that is not like you
Look at his bridge. A Klingon. An android. A blind engineer. A counselor who senses feelings.
None of them thought alike. That was the point.
Hard problems need many angles. If everyone in your room nods together, someone is holding something back.
4. Four lights
In “Chain of Command”, Picard is captured and interrogated. His captor holds up four lights and tells him to say five.
Picard refuses. “There are four lights!”
Later he admits that, at the very end, he had begun to see five.
No founder faces an ordeal like that. But we all feel a milder version of it.
A board wants growth. An investor wants a bigger story. A team wants good news. So a number gets bent a little to please the room. Revenue. Runway. Pipeline.
That is the fifth light.
Four is four. Report what is true. And know that pressure bends even the best of us.
5. Stay with what is in front of you
In “The Measure of a Man”, Picard defends Data in a hearing. Data is an android. Is he a person, or property?
Great television. Picard argues it superbly. What I take from him is his calm. He met a hard question with clear thinking, not fear.
But Data is a character in a story. He is not a forecast.
My view is simple. Don’t anthropomorphise today’s AI. It is not a being. It is not plotting anything. I use ChatGPT and Claude Code every day. They are capable assistants. Nothing more.
The fear of machines taking over humans is, to me, an unnecessary worry. It comes from drinking too much science fiction Kool-Aid. The later series Picard built whole storylines on fear of synthetic life. Good drama. Poor business guidance.
Founders have real questions today. What does AI do to my costs, my people, my customers, my community?
Work on those. Leave the far horizon to the experts in the field.
6. Your scars stay with you
“Tapestry” is a Next Generation episode. As a young man, Picard picked a bar fight and was stabbed through the heart. He has lived with an artificial heart since.
Now, near death, he wishes he could undo that reckless youth. A being called Q gives him the chance.
He avoids the fight. And wakes up a careful, forgettable junior officer who never commands a ship.
He begs to go back.
The scar was part of who he had become.
I carry one too. I was 14.
I was on an NCC trek near Pune. I had never spent a night away from my parents. We walked over 30 kilometres a day across hilltops and forts.
On one descent, I slipped. My canvas shoes made it worse. I slid fast towards a rock face several hundred feet below.
A senior cadet from a city college caught hold of me. He stayed by me for the rest of that day. I never learnt his name. I owe him my life.
The scar from that slip stayed with me for years.
It still does. Whenever I have faced an impossible situation, with no way out, my mind goes back to that slope. To the fall. And to the hand that caught me.
Every founder carries a scar like this. A moment that never quite leaves.
It returns when the pressure is highest. Know yours.
Then remember who caught you. A mentor cannot stop you from slipping. A mentor is the one who catches you when you do. In The Founder Catalyst, I wrote that “every founder needs a mentor — and every founder must also be one.”
The scar reminds you of the fall. The mentor is why it was not the end. Be that mentor for the next founder.
7. Optimism is a working tool
Star Trek’s future is not free of trouble. Its people just assume trouble can be solved.
That is not a mood. It is practical. A team that believes a problem is solvable will actually work on it.
Star Trek shaped how I think about complex issues, more than I realised at the time.
Sir Patrick Stewart has passed away at the age of 86. AI can now recreate a face and a voice. It will never be the real Patrick Stewart. For millions of fans like me, he will always be Captain Jean-Luc Picard.
Thank you, Captain. Rest in peace, Sir Patrick.