For and Against - management from the explorers of yesteryear

This is a fascinating question, affirmed by the audiences that I talk to today. I’ve noticed when I talk to blue chip companies, major financial services firms and so on, they tick off the lessons learned in order. And with Ernest Shackleton these lessons are revealed in four leadership qualities: Leading by example, communicating effectively, keeping up morale and driving a positive outcome. This last attribute is not to do with putting a rosy perspective on misfortune, or a Pollyanna-ish way of looking at things. It is a way of constantly driving that outcome. These are as relevant today as they were a century ago when Shackleton was leading one of the greatest rescue missions the world has ever heard about. That is what’s constantly fascinating about the question. And the answer is, yes we can learn from these explorers of old.In the past two decades there has been a sharp focus on managing to quarterly and monthly outcomes and returns. But with Shackleton we see the focus on a more important goal. He’s been dead 90 years and the rescue mission on his Endurance expedition - where he famously travelled 800 miles across the roughest seas in the world in a 23ft whaler to fetch relief for his men - was just that. A rescue mission at the end of a failed expedition. Andy Grove, CEO of Intel calls this the ‘strategic inflection point’. And you can see how this applied to Intel, who nearly went out of business on a number of occasions. They had to completely re-engineer themselves and say: “Okay, this way leads to disaster, but we can tweak our business model.”

Take a look at Dick Fuld at Lehman Brothers and the whole disaster at Enron. These people totally drove themselves off the cliff. I mean, what could they possibly have been thinking? Now Shackleton saw the more important goal. Having lost his ship, and faced with what looked like certain death in Antarctica, he said: “Look, we’re going to survive”. In effect he was saying that once they had survived they could revisit the smaller goals that were objectives of the original expedition. But the important goal crucial to the longer-term strategy was survival.

That is Shackleton’s most astonishing accomplishment. He got every single one of his men home alive, and not only that, throughout their ordeal, they actually had quite a good time. Given their circumstances - where the men had virtually nothing - how on earth did their leader keep them motivated and happy? But Shackleton built such camaraderie that in the 1950s, four decades after the expedition, there were survivors saying that they had never before or since experienced another crew like that of Endurance.

What is so odd about this is that it wasn’t until the 1960s that a true understanding of Shackleton’s leadership was reached. Up until that point all the talk had been of his earlier and phenomenally successful Nimrod expedition. But we now know that Shackleton learned more from the Endurance disaster than his successes. Nasa learned more from Apollo 13 than it did from all the other space missions combined. There is something of a parallel here, where it is failing to achieve our goal that we really see our challenges.

None of us wants to go through disasters and we want to run our lives and our businesses happily. But we live in an era where a billion emails get sent a day and financial transactions are made in fractions of seconds over enormous networks. So you could ask if we aren’t just being a bit old-fashioned looking for our inspiration from a man in a wooden boat who never had the advantage of any of the digital technology that we have today. But, of course, there is always ‘true north’ (or in Shackleton’s case south), by which I mean that real values and aspirations remain the same, and it is when we allow ourselves to be diverted from these that mistakes are made. So for me it makes sense to look at how Shackleton in particular coped with adversity and apply it to the modern world.