Of Rogue Waves and Leadership by Jodi Guerra

They went on through the night, walking, walking and walking. Shackleton said later:

“It might have been different if we’d had only ourselves to think about. You can get so tired in the snow, particularly if you’re hungry, that sleep seems just the best thing life has to give. And to sleep out there is to die, to die without any pain at all, like Keats’s ideal of death. But if you’re a leader, a fellow that other fellows look to, you’ve got to keep going. That was the thought, which sailed us through the hurricane and tugged us up and down those mountains.”(Morrell, 194)

At one point they did stop to rest:

“They found a little sheltered spot behind a rock and sat down, huddled together with their arms around one another for warmth. Almost at once Worsley and Crean fell asleep, and Shackleton, too, caught himself nodding. Suddenly he jerked his head upright. All the years of Antarctic experience told him that this was the danger sign –the fatal sleep that trails off into freezing death. He fought to stay awake for five long minutes, then he woke the others, telling them that they had slept for half an hour.”

(Lansing, 269)

Finally, at 7 a.m. they Shackleton heard the factory whistle at the whaling station. The three men stood, smiled and shook hands. “Let’s go down,” Shackleton said.

After making their final descent, the men entered the village. Schoolboys ran from them in horror. Noone comes in or enters the village from that direction; strangers would be coming from the docks, not the mountains. And they probably wouldn’t look like these guys looked: heavy beards, ragged clothes, black faces from the oily smoke.

Whaling Factory in South Georgia

When they finally were taken and then appeared before the factory manager, he didn’t recognize them.“Who the hell are you?” he inquired. “My name is Shackleton,” the Boss replied.

The men were treated as heroes by the whalers. They couldn’t believe the voyage and trek across the mountains they had made. They were treated to a dinner that night.

After the dinner, Worsley left on a whaler to go to the other side of the island to pick up McNeish, McCarthy and Vincent.

In less than seventy-two hours, Shackleton was off attempting to reach Elephant Island. It took him four attempts and more than three months to do it, but he did finally get through the ice on August 30,1916.

The men on the island were in the habit of getting up getting going. Wild would yell out, “Lash up and stow! The Boss may come today!” Of course, many men were beginning to doubt that.

One day, however, he did finally come. As the men were huddled around eating lunch, Marston, the artist, came running in announcing the appearance of a ship. Of course, everyone ran out of their little hut. To much cheering the ship drew closer. A small boat was lowered, and Shackleton and Crean were in it. Shackleton had already counted out all twenty-two figures on the shore through his binoculars. “Are all well?” Shackleton shouted. “YES!” came the reply.

Awaiting Rescue

Epilogue:

Ernest Shackleton’s famous journey is a brilliant example of servant leadership in action. His story and the story of his ship the Endurance, named after the Shackleton  Family Motto, is nothing short of miraculous. It teaches us about the living nature of teamwork and about the unselfish, emergent nature of leadership.  It also teaches us about astonishing possibilities that miracles do happen.

Whenever someone points out an example of a great leader, I like to compare the person to Shackelton. If there were a “gold standard” of leadership Shackleton would certainly be it. Few are not moved by his story.

May it continue to inspire us to emulate his example and change the world for the better.

Shackelton and his Crew

Lead people, Manage process. Superperformance Proverb

The organization is an organism. Peter Senge

A Great Wind is Blowing

Knowledge and human capital are making a dramatic debut here at the onset of the new decade. Together they signal a critical shift in organizational life to something new and different, especially when it comes to dealing with people. The best of a company’s knowledge and human capital walks out the door everyday at 5:00PM. These two forms of capital are intangible; they have not been a part of the traditional balance sheet. Capturing and increasing the value of these capital assets requires a new set of skills. As many have noted, in the Internet age “knowledge workers” have the leverage. And they carry their means of production with them wherever they go.

The result is that management as a professional discipline is on the verge on a major transformation. While management’s famous guru Peter Drucker insisted that management is the organization’s single most important “organ,” he also declared it is not possible to do it to people. Rather, he stated, “the task is to lead.” Lloyd Provost and his Quality colleagues at API propose that it is only processes that can be managed, and only then through the purposeful application of continual testing and learning, aided by the use of statistical control methods. Esther Dyson drew from the new science of complexity, in particular complex adaptive systems or “CAS” to characterize this impending transformation through a different lens. From this view the new management acts in a distributed way, akin to an “immunity,” a capacity that everyone can and should participate in and practice.

Superperforming management and leadership co-joins improvement and complexity science to create a new approach that leverages both process and culture together. This incredible new “biophysics of optimization” signals a fundamental shift away from a mechanistic view and toward a view of organizations as living organisms.

Only a view of organizations as organic systems can accommodate the discovery of complementarity that is the source of Superperformance. Only a life science can explain it. Organisms and ecosystems evolve, self-organize, and emerge, machines do not. Superperforming Management and Leadership is about the productivity of knowledge, especially as it pertains to increasing customer value and driving unprecedented performance levels. Productivity of knowledge is driven by the inspiration and motivation of people. And people are inspired and motivated by the opportunity to contribute, the chance for personal growth and challenging work, relationships, real involvement in a shared vision, servant leadership, and much, much more.

Unless organizations can encourage intrinsic motivation and affirm these needs, they will not realize their full potential, and the promise of knowledge productivity will elude them. Human and knowledge capital are interdependent, they reinforce and amplify each other.

Nature shows us that as with any major evolutionary change, some learn and develop new capabilities while others resist and eventually die out. Some will achieve the high peaks of the new “fitness landscape” while others will sink into a deep valley where the old industrial age command-and-control methods simply do not work anymore.

The Revolution is here.

The discovery of Superperformance introduces a shockingly simple, reliable approach to optimizing performance. This discovery identifies a steady state, a sweet spot described by complexity scientists as the location of maximum fitness in a system. This location refers to a balance point precariously perched between order and chaos. It is more of a continuously shifting space than a static location: a dynamic, energetic, catalytic space. It is the place where all new ideas, change and self-organization emerge. All of Superperformance occurs in this space – and what’s more, any system can be tuned to this higher level of organizational consciousness and operational performance.

This is why Agile is the new normal. Navigating in this zone is called surfing the edge of chaos. Here the tension between order and disorder is at the highest level possible. Too much chaos will marginalize or dilute an idea or project. Too much order is likewise unhealthy, giving rise to rigidity and stasis. Work groups, project communities, and entire organizations can leverage the edge of chaos to maximize performance and to find a way forward in these uncertain times. People in organizations are beginning to see that this disequilibrium is effective and important to organizational survival. Within this fitness state, people and projects self-organize and work achieves a flow state punctuated by agility, novelty and innovation. It may seem incredible or illogical, but superperformance is tied to tolerating and even encouraging this persistent disequilibrium.

This 21^st Century approach reinvents management and leadership and advocates for a shift away from a Machine View to an Organism View of organization. It is being applied by an increasing number of project teams, organizations, and communities to produce unprecedented customer outcomes, operational excellence, breakthrough innovation, joy in work, and shareholder return on investment.