Dr. Who vs Captain Kirk

Who won?

Do we have any “Doctor Who” fans in the house? It’s this show about a charismatic, human-looking alien, who travels around space and time saving the galaxy from evil. Now I bet you’re wondering, ‘ok, how is he going to relate this back to business competition?’ and I’ll tell you — it’s not the characters or plot lines that interest me today, but rather, how this show competed with it’s rival: Star Trek.

Both shows started in the early-mid 1960's, at a time of tremendous global curiosity around space and interstellar communication. We had JFK promising a man on the moon, a high-intensity space race with the Soviet Union, and countless “sightings” of UFO’s. Both shows tackled moral issues, (it’s famously noted that Star Trek is among the first shows to feature a multi-racial cast), and both shows twisted our minds when questions of fate, purpose, and right-vs-wrong were presented to the characters. Both shows had writers that worked on both franchises, and both shows kept up on and often loosely copied the themes and villains that the other would dream up. Star Trek went on to spin off 5 additional TV series, 12 films, including very recent ones, and countless books. Doctor Who is considered a British icon, with it’s own slew of spinoffs, a successful and ongoing relaunch in 2005, and arguably more viewers worldwide than Trek. So which protagonist, Captain Kirk or The Doctor, has won?

Well there’s no answer today, for the same reason there’s no answer on whether Box or Dropbox or OneDrive or GDrive has won, or whether Android or iOS has won, or whether Uber or Lyft has won — we’re still in the thick of these wars. The better question is — what would winning look like, and in what ways could we get there? We should start our jobs everyday with that top of mind.