Business Leadership Lessons from Sir Ernest Shackleton and Antarctic Mike

All Blog Posts / 25.04.2016

Leadership can drive an organization to greatness or it can allow it to slowly crumble and die. We tend to attribute success to the hard work of an individual, but in reality it is the collective work of the team that allows a company to achieve great things. Chief Executives must make sure that they have the right people in the right roles to order to achieve the best possible results.

In order to really illustrate this concept for my Vistage members, I brought in Mike Pierce to speak to the business leadership lessons that we can all learn from Sir Ernest Shackleton.

Shackleton is best known for saving the lives of his entire crew when disaster struck and their ship named the Endurance became trapped in pack ice and was slowly crushed before the party could make it to land. The crew escaped by camping on the sea ice until it melted and then launching the lifeboats to reach first Elephant Island and then ultimately sending an advanced crew to the inhabited island of South Georgia via a stormy ocean voyage of 720 nautical miles. This was Shackleton’s most famous exploit as he then had to return to Elephant Island to rescue the remainder of his crew.

Remarkably Shackleton did not lose a single man during this brutal 2-year ordeal in the harshest conditions on the planet. Shackleton knew that he could trust his crew to deliver in their roles, and because of this and his leadership, everyone made it home safely. He knew that his team would preserver because the right men were in the right roles.

“Antarctic Mike” applies Shackleton’s lessons, along with his own experience endurance racing in the same arctic climate, directly to business leadership and helping Vistage owners ensure that they have the right team in place. My Vistage members came away with tangible insights that will help them bring their teams to the next level.

One of the biggest lessons was how to recruit the right people to join you. Many have seen the following ad that Shackleton allegedly placed in the London times to recruit his team, and generated over 5000 applications.

Antarctic Mike helped one of my members create a video version for his company in about 5 minutes. He asked him to tell a few customer success stories, and then we shot this short video that a person could put on their company website or LinkedIn.

Take less than 5 minutes and watch it for a clever low cost way to attract the right people to your organization.