Lead when the chips are down

You are making a journey through an uninhabited landscape. Resources are limited, and experience, though useful, is insufficient. Some parts of the terrain have been mapped, but the land itself is shifting – the locations you are counting have moved or ceased to exist. Visibility is limited, and what you see may not be real. Survival is just a struggle, and when you move painfully towards your goal, you are always aware that time is running out.

It is certainly a perfect metaphor for a high-stakes business adventure, but it is also a description of exploring Antarctica. Over the years, commentators have excavated polar expeditions for management lessons on topics such as Ernest Shackleton, the famous Anglo-Irish Antarctic Explorer, the importance of hiring good people, and overcoming obstacles. But the adventures of Shackleton and his men are far more complex and fascinating than any mere homily about teamwork. Great biography of Roland Huntford Shackleton Captures the guy and recreates his adventures so powerfully that you’ll want to bundle them up. Of Alfred Lansing Tolerance: The incredible journey of Shackleton Tells the story of his determination to save the people of Shackleton during his catastrophic third attempt at the South Pole after their ship was wrecked by ice.

Still, there is nothing to hear about the race directly from the horse’s mouth. You can do this without immersing yourself in the risk of frostbite Antarctic heart, An interesting memoir of his 1908 attack on the Shackleton pole. (Look for the second edition, which has been republished for some time — and who? —Penguin.)

Written in vivid, straightforward prose by journalist Edward Saunders (based on Shackleton’s Diction), the book describes a journey of almost unimaginable difficulty taken with different goals কিন্তু but first to reach the South Pole early. There is no lack of action and adventure; A wrong move or a wrong judgment can easily mean the end. Lucky trade-offs are involved with every decision. And everyone has to live with Shackleton’s flaws.

Yet whatever his shortcomings, Shackleton was a born leader. In his biography, Huntford says the adventurer was gifted with “a strange combination of dashing unpreparedness and clever caution.” He asked many of his people, but was always ready to give his life for them. Day after day, they advanced in spite of the cold, starvation, blindness, and despair, and no one advanced himself beyond the boss, as he was known. “I came back very early tonight,” he wrote in astonishment, “because I have done twenty-nine miles in the last twenty-four hours.”

Of particular note is Shackleton’s obsessive nature of confronting an area that is resistant to accurate perception. We take the risk to say that the business landscape presents the same challenges as the South Pole, yet the perceptual difficulties created by Antarctica offer a clear parallel for executives and entrepreneurs. The southernmost continent is unpredictable, unstable and unforgiving. The compass does not behave normally. Most of what Terra Pharma sees is actually floating ice, and deadly curves hiding under the snow. Snow blindness, a painful effect of the glossy environment, can make vision itself impossible.

“There was a strange light,” Shackleton observed at one point, “which made the distances and shapes of objects very deceptive, and created a lot of mirages, which showed things much more than real … The penguins we saw the night before were still in the same place and When they were a few miles away, they were about six feet high. “

But don’t forget the obsession. Antarctica, like the pursuit of a great business, is dangerously engulfed. Shackleton attempts to reach the South Pole three times and fails: as part of an expedition led by Robert Falcon Scott, his obsession first spreads as a young man, who may later try again and lose his life; It was then chronicled on its own from 1907-09 Antarctic heart; And finally in containers Tolerance, Which was captured and then destroyed by ice, which was stuck in all ships. Shackleton and five others sailed a 22-foot boat 800 miles across the Arctic Ocean and then became mountaineers across the island of South Georgia for help. He has saved every life in the end.

But all that was yet to come. Shackleton’s failure as manager is reflected in his plans The heart of Antarctica Expeditions. For a 1,720-mile walk from the pole, his four-member unit brought food for just 91 days of hard work, high altitude, and mind numbness. The crew instructed his return Nimrod, The ship that dropped off his party, was impossibly vague. He avoids skis and dogs, which he later uses to reach the pole. Later, when Shackleton charges £ 2,000 to enter an exhibition on the ship NimrodHe has donated to charities যদিও although some of his Antarctic team has not yet been fully funded.

But when the chips were down, he had no equal, “as if the highest danger is needed for complacency,” Huntford wrote in his autobiography. “He had some magic that overcame the seemingly hopeless outside situation.” One of his three classmates at the pole would call him “God’s greatest leader ever to come to earth.” Another, Frank Wild, writes that “it was not possible for Shackleton to give way to despair.” One night in their dilapidated tent, hungry, frozen, and facing the real possibility of death, the boss asked if Wilde would join him in another such expedition. The answer, without hesitation, was yes.

Desperate in the harsh weather, suffering from diarrhea, frostbite and possibly scurvy, Shackleton and three others who tried for the pole reached out to their teaters. Elevation meant they were hungry for oxygen like food and they were suffering from perforated headaches. Their body temperature, too low to register on a thermometer starting at 94 degrees Fahrenheit, screams hypothermia.

Yet no one tried to go back. In the end, Shackleton had the idea of ​​disrespecting the huge drowning cost of the initiative and instead called for a halt just 97 miles from the target. Return was a competition against death. Despite their catastrophic condition, the men had to find a series of supply caches they left behind, meanwhile carrying so little food that a single wrong turn could be fatal. Any supplies they reach have to be pulled on a sled. Shackleton’s diary of January 17, 1909 shows how he and his companions reacted: “It started sharply at 7 in the morning, in a fresh blizzard, with a temperature of minus 23 degrees Fahrenheit, we did our best march, because it was basically a descent and we Covered 22 1/2 miles. “

They were living on pemican and pony meat bits and eating only four short biscuits a day when Wild recorded that Shackleton “personally forced me to give him one of his breakfast biscuits, and would have given me one more gift tonight if I had allowed him.” No one else in the world can fully comprehend how much generosity and sympathy it showed; I do, and I swear to God I will never forget that one biscuit would not have been bought with thousands of pounds. “

Despite his appetite for glory, the boss’s greatest heroism may be acknowledging failure and embracing it so that he and his companions can survive for another day. “I must look at the matter sensitively and consider the lives of those who are with me,” he wrote. “People can only do their best.”