Just finished a fantastic leadership book called The Endurance about the true story of the mind-blowing heroic efforts of a polar explorer (Sir Ernest Shackleton) to save his crew stranded on a remote island in Antarctica. The book reads like an adventure... and, if nothing else, makes you realize that at no point have you been truly "cold" in your life.
Best of all, I thought, were the occasional leadership principles the author, Caroline Alexander, extracts along the way. Here are two, just as examples. The first is taken from the diary of one of the stranded crewmen:
"When occasion demanded he (Shackleton) would attend personally to the smallest details...sometimes it would appear to the thoughtless that his care amounted almost to fussiness, and it was only afterwards that we understood the supreme importance of his ceaseless watchfulness. Behind every calculated word and gesture was a single-minded determination to do what was best for his men."
And this one:
"At the core of Shackleton's gift for leadership in crisis was an adamantine conviction that quite ordinary individuals were capable of heroic feats if the circumstances required; the weak and the strong could and must survive together. The mystique that Shackleton acquired as a leader may partly be attributed to the fact that he elicited from his men strength and endurance they had never imagined they possessed; he ennobled them."
Comments