In early 1915, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship became trapped in ice, north of Antarctica. For almost two years, he and his crew braved those frozen expanses. Then, in December 1916, Shackleton led them all to safety.
In this episode, Harvard Business School professor and historian Nancy Koehn analyzes Shackleton’s leadership during those two fateful years that he and his men struggled to survive. ADI IGNATIUS: We’re starting this series with Ernest Shackleton, one of the great explorers in the age of polar exploration in the early 20th Century. To set the context in the U.S., Teddy Roosevelt is President. Ford Motor Company has just produced its first car and the race to discover the South Pole is on.
ADI IGNATIUS: OK. So, here’s lesson number one. What do you do when you have a bad boss? I mean, to what extent does he learn lessons from an initial foray gone badly? ADI IGNATIUS: So, was he hiring people who pleased him, or do you think he really was thinking at that high level about these attributes?
ADI IGNATIUS: So, by now Shackleton has his team for the Endurance mission assembled. Now what happens first? NANCY KOEHN: He shows up every day in terms of his mission. So, we are rarely taught as leaders, managers, parents, teachers that how you get through your day, how a leader shows up, what your body language is, are you looking at your phone as you sit down in a meeting immediately with everyone around you. If you’re doing that everyone else will be doing that. Shackleton understands that. He looks confident. He carries himself carefully. We know from his diaries that he was nervous.
NANCY KOEHN: I think most of what he does is calculated. Once he’s on the ice and the ship goes down, and the mission of walking across the Antarctica is over, everything he does in this very high-stakes situation, when he’s talking about keeping his men alive, is calculated. That’s what’s so interesting. And I mean calculation with a great deal of admiration and pragmatism when I say that. This is someone who says, “I have to keep them alive.
NANCY KOEHN: He didn’t own it publicly. There was no, you know, it’s my fault, or I take responsibility. There was no Johnson & Johnson kind of moment with Jim Burke the CEO –NANCY KOEHN: Right. This is our problem. We own it. We’ll make it right. And yet, he owned it completely. I can’t help, but think some of the resilience and the determination, and the extraordinary improvisation of this story, which just gets more and more and more and more difficult for almost two years.
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