Robert Downey Jr. returns as Nathan Stark/Iron Man, this weekend, as the sequel to the 2008's Iron Man movie hits theaters. If you haven't seen it be warned: this article talks about the movie, and contains information that might spoil your enjoyment of the movie if you haven't seen it.
You're probably wondering what you can learn from a movie adapted from a comic book, but if you've ever heard anyone say "with great power comes great responsibility" then you've heard people quoting Uncle Ben from the SpiderMan comic books. So clearly there are some things we can be taught.
This is the part where you realize that the author did not have many girlfriends in high school. Or college. Or his 20s.
Patents and copyrights don't guarantee protection from imitators.
Ivan Vanko builds his own arc reactor and suit, and is the movie's bad guy, Whiplash.
Protecting your inventions and products with patents and copyrights is a good idea. Essentially, patents protect the ideas and innovation behind a product while you develop it, copyright protects the design plans of the product, and copyright and trademarks protect the physical product you want to sell. However, there are limits to how much protection you can have under US law.
Patents protect inventions, methods of manufacture, program code, formulae ... that kind of thing. Since patents are granted for a fixed period of time, they need to be renewed. If your patent expires, your ability to sue for infringement also expires.
If you have devised a way for cars to be powered by household trash you should patent it. Drawing up the plans for the car and submitting the plans for copyright will not protect the power-providing technology, only the vehicle as drawn in the plans. And you should know that any item submitted for copyright protection is publicly accessible -- so your fancy technology would be accessible in the plans because the copyright doesn't protect the technology, only the plans as drawn. Make sense?
Names are not protected by copyright, but they may be protected as trademarks.
Develop your employees.
Tony Stark promotes his personal assistant, Pepper Potts, to CEO of Stark Industries.
In order to keep employees engaged in the growth of the business, the business should be engaged in the growth of each employee. That doesn't mean you have to pay for employee college tuition, either -- by setting goals and assigning tasks that expand the employee's horizons, and improve their career prospects, you achieve two things: one is that the employee feels respected and invested in, and can see their future career options; the second is that you retain a motivated member of your team who sees their future at your company. You can find that deal in the dictionary under "Win-Win."
Okay, that was a lie.
Just because a person is talented doesn't make them the right fit for every project.
Nick Fury, director of S.H.I.E.L.D, tells Tony Stark that he's unsuitable for the Avengers Initiative, but that he'd like someone more responsible in the Iron Man suit.
This is a case of the right skills being in the wrong personality for the organization. Painful as it is to accept, sometimes the right personality doesn't have the right blend of skills and experience to benefit a particular project, and the opposite is also true -- sometimes the exact skills and experience are in the wrong personality type. Exposing your sales staff to the day-to-day responsibilities of the sales administration and order fulfillment people, or the IT staff to their technology's end-users, will give each an understanding of the pressures unique to each job, and hopefully remind everyone that they're all on the same team.
But really, when you get right down to it, if your technologist can't speak the langage of your clients, you can help them to learn how to overcome that problem, hire an interpreter, or find a technologist that's a better fit.
Your company is the thing that makes you tick. Like a time-bomb.
Tony Stark's arc reactor contains palladium, and while the reactor is keeping Stark alive, the palladium is slowly killing him.
We all get involved in our work, especially if we're passionate about it. But it's important to remember why you're so engrossed. Most of us have loved ones we'd like to spend more time with, family we'd like to enjoy, friends we'd like to cook out with once in a while. The elusive work/life balance is something that all entrepreneurs struggle with, so go see a movie this weekend, take a breath, look at why you work so hard and ... give your cellphone to your spouse and ask them to only give it back to you if you get an email or text telling you that your office or factory or store is burning to the ground. Give up control of your cellphone for a morning, or any span of a few hours. Take the time to reconnect with the people who are supporting you, and most of all, don't let the thing that drives you be the thing that slowly kills you.
No matter how well your last product launch went, the new one can be better.
Iron Man, the first movie, took $585 million in worldwide box office sales. That's about eight cents from everybody in the world. Iron Man 2 looks set to gross around $737 million - or about a dime from everybody in the world. But those are just predicted numbers. What is certain is that Iron Man 2 has already earned back 60 percent of its production costs, and it hasn't played on a single screen in the United States yet.
Paying attention to these simple lessons will put you on course to being an astute business owner and super hero (just like Tony Stark). Ignore them and you may end up a self-involved, alcoholic egomaniac (just like Tony Stark).
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