Shackleton's Way?
Shackleton's
Way:
Leadership Lessons from the Great Antarctic Explorer:
There is something fascinating, and very nearly hilarious, in the irony of Sir Ernest Shackleton re-emerging as a potential hero for the business class, and for New Economy leaders in particular, at this moment in history. The story of Sir Ernest, and his ship Endurance, is irresistible, and it has been told many times, from Alfred Lansing's 1959 book Endurance to Caroline Alexander's 1999 The Endurance, as well as in Shackleton's own memoir and even, most recently, an IMAX film. Now here it is again, in Shackleton's Way, by Margot Morrell of Fidelity and Stephanie Capparell of The Wall Street Journal, who explicitly offer Shackleton as a leadership role modle; in February the book debuted on the New York Times business bestseller list at No. 7.
The irony, of course, is that Ernest Shackleton failed, and failed spectacularly. He is celebrated today not for achieving his goal — which was to traverse Antarctica — but for astonishing grace under pressure as his mission fell apart. His achievement was one of damage control, leading his team to safety after failing to accomplish his true mission. No one in his charge died, and it is certainly true that there is something impressive about this, given the circumstances, and that under different leadership the result might have been grislier. Even so, the man did not succeed at what he meant to do, and in fact he did not come close. What he did was survive. In a post-bubble, bankruptcy-riddled world, that's a sobering thought for the armies of erstwhile New Economy world-changers.
But it's easy to see why it's an appealing thought, too. Many adventurers of the New Economy now find themselves bobbing along in their miserable lifeboats, eyes straining at the compass, fending off mutinous threats from those who find worthless stock options to be the moral equivalent of living in wet clothing on an ice floe. To remember Shackleton is to remember that there is hope yet for celebration. It's no wonder that not long ago, Jeff Bezos ' "wish list" on Amazon.com listed four Shackleton-related items (or that someone has since purchased all four of them for him). What Shackleton, or any other explorer, can really tell us, however, is not so clear at all. It may be romantic to think of business as an adventure, but is it wise?
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Shackleton was born in County Kildare, Ireland, and left school in his middle teens. He was a networker, a self-promoter, a glad-hander (and, students of presidential personality traits should note, a nickname-giver), a man with a "genius for raising funds." He was also press-friendly and as shameless a hype artist as any modern CEO. In 1914, the Endurance (Shackleton's third such mission) sailed from London to Buenos Aires and then southward toward Antarctica.
As it happens, the Endurance did not have first-mover advantage: The Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen was the first man to the South Pole, in 1911. Like an entrepreneur crafting a "story" that will hook investors, Shackleton set out to be the first to cross Antarctica on foot, a journey he positioned as the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. The utility of this undertaking — launched precisely as Great Britain entered the first World War — was a bit sketchy, but the whole thing apparently sounded cool enough to score some 40,000 British pounds from private investors in addition to about 10,000 pounds from the government (adding up to about $10 million in today's money, according to Shackleton's Way). In a 1999 New York Review of Books essay that is one of the few nonworshipful tellings of the Endurance story, Jonathan Raban observes that "Shackleton saw the expedition in anticipation of the lucrative news splash that would attend its triumphant return home."
The Endurance never reached its destination: About a day away from its planned landing point, it was "frozen in." The men waited on the stuck ship for the weather to warm and for channels to open in the ice; after 10 months or so, the ship was not freed from the ice, but smashed by it. I suppose you could call that a critical inflection point. The new mission was to remain alive. After an attempt at marching to land, the crew camped on the ice in a series of locations for another six months. Finally the ice opened up enough that they were able to use lifeboats salvaged from the Endurance to reach a small island, and from there part of the group, including Shackleton, took the best boat to get back to the nearest outpost of civilization. The rest of the crew were rounded up in short order. All 28 survived. Shackleton, the authors report, was "feted as a hero" on several continents (although, alas, the attention didn't last, as there was still a world war going on).
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The story is an inspiration, but to what extent is it a model? One suspects that a core attraction of the Endurance tale at this particular moment is that it proves just how fluid the nature of success is, how quickly the attainment of a new goal can obliterate the failure to achieve a prior one. And redefining goals — downward if need be — as the environment changes can be critical.
In business, this is an old lesson, and it's being relearned all over the New Economy. The Wall Street Journal recently published an entire two-part special section on the subject of reinventing sputtering e-commerce businesses. To pick one random example, consider PayPal, Inc. Initially, it offered a service to people who wanted to transfer money to each other using the infrared zapper in Palm Pilots. It wasn't until PayPal noticed that what people were using most was its tangential service allowing payments via e-mail that the survival instinct kicked in, and the company changed course. The old plan would have sunk the company beneath the ice by now, but it's too early to say whether PayPal will ever reach an island of profitable growth.
Our ideas about success are, by necessity, forged only in hindsight. We see a success, in business or elsewhere, and look backward, trying to figure out what it was that set it in motion and kept it from going under. Shackleton and his team survived against remarkable odds, and so now we pore over the evidence and decide that this was because of Shackleton's extraordinary judgment and, above all else, his unflagging optimism.
If these are the qualities that redeemed Shackleton, it's uncertain what they teach us about managing our own crises, in business or otherwise. One of the better messages of the Shackleton story, as retold by Morrell and Capparell, is its argument for humane management, whatever the circumstances. Then again, while it's true that Shackleton often made excellent decisions in matching men and assignments and that he was always accessible and so on, the circumstances were unique: His was a small team, and they lived with one another and no one else for a long time. It's astonishing to read about how well he kept up the spirits of the crew — the various soccer matches on the ice and the dog racing and other goofing off that ensued, as though the stranded sailors were at summer camp — but all of this is helpful in only the broadest sense.
That leaves Shackleton's optimism as his most attractive, most easily grasped and most easily imitated leadership trait. I'm all for optimism, of course. It has to be correct that optimism is an important ingredient of success, and rare indeed is the person who makes it big without believing in his mission, or who surrounds herself with pessimistic lieutenants. But success has other ingredients, too, such as good fortune — and, not incidentally, being right. No amount of optimism or conviction would have made PayPal a success with its earliest strategy. And no amount of it will save those firms whose business propositions are rooted in the wishful thinking of the recent past from failing in the near future.
In the aftermath of the Endurance failure, Shackleton's optimism was the right thing in the right place at the right time, and the results speak for themselves. A few years later, en route to a follow-up his British Oceanographical and Sub-Antarctic Expedition, Shackleton suffered a heart attack, but would not even let the ship's doctor examine him. Morrell and Capparell write that he "steadfastly refused to give in to his ailments and pushed forward with his plans." Raban's less fawning assessment is that for Shackleton, "denying the obvious had become a habit of mind." Either way, the heart condition killed him within weeks, before that voyage even made its final push toward the South Pole. And therein lies a fairly critical lesson not only about the limits of what Shackleton can teach us, but also about the limits of optimism itself. If you are optimistic and right, then perhaps you will find a way to be a hero. If you are optimistic and wrong, in business or adventuring, then you will simply be dead.
A similar version of this essay appeared in the March 5, 2001, issue of The Industry Standard.
