On Elephant Island the men had to try to find shelter. What they ended up with was the two boats overturned on top of stones with bits of moss and canvas stuck in the wholes. All twenty-two of the men lived in that!

Their days were spent discussing the Caird voyage, walking around the tiny strip of land, hunting and taking care of patients:

“Kerr developed a bad tooth and Macklin had to pull it for him. ‘And a grimy quack of a dentist I must have looked,’ wrote Macklin. ‘Not much refinement here – ‘Come outside and open your mouth’ – no cocaine or anesthesia.’“

Wordie’s hand became infected, and Holness was troubled with a sty. Rickenson was slowly recovering from the heart attack he suffered the day they landed, but the saltwater boils on his wrists stubbornly refused to heal. Greenstreet’s feet, which had been frostbitten in the boats, did not improve and he was confined to his sleeping bag.

Hudson seemed in a serious way. His hands showed definite signs of healing, but the pain in his left buttock which had begun in the boats had developed into a very large abscess which pained him constantly. Mentally, too, the scars of the boat journey apparently were still with him. Much of the time he lay in his sleeping bag for hours without speaking, and he seemed disinterested and detached from what was going on around him.

“The most serious invalid was Blackboro. His right foot appeared to be recovering, and there was hope that it might even be saved. But in the toes of his left foot gangrene had already set in…”

(Lansing, 199-200)

Eventually Blackboro’s toes all had to be amputated with the surgeons performing the surgery in that tiny hut!

Somehow, they still had that banjo!  So Hussey was still playing that for entertainment.

The men had to spend the winter on Elephant Island, and the days grew so monotonous for them.  All they could do was wait……

What, though, happened to the James Caird?

It took 16 days, but our heroes did reach their destination. The men aboard the boat were divided into two crews who took turns navigating the boat or going down below to try to sleep.

They really didn’t get to sleep that much as it was virtually impossible to do so. On this trip there would be no floes upon which to stop and even partially rest. This trip was a direct, non-stop.

What a difficult journey:

“’We were getting soaked on an average every three or four minutes,’ wrote Worsley.‘This went on day and night. The cold was intense.’ Particularly hateful was the task of working the pump,

which one man had to hold hard against the bottom of the boat with bare hands – a position that could not be endured beyond five or six minutes at a time.”

(Alexander, 146)

Sprayed by water, baling water, trying to steer, stung by the wind, chipping ice off the ship – these were all non-stop efforts. Day after day of gales and hurricanes faced by this twenty-two foot open boat.

We’ve already mentioned the rogue wave that nearly capsized the James Caird. How did theyhold up?

Here’s what faced them physically:

“The men were soaked to the bone and frostbitten. They were badly chafed by wet clothes that had not been removed for seven months, and afflicted with saltwater boils.Their wet feet and legs were a sickly white color and swollen. Their hands were black –with grime, blubber, burns from the Primus and frostbite. The least movement was excruciating.”

(Alexander, 147)

The trip took a toll on Vincent who appears to have just cratered. McNeish suffered as well:

“’Two of the party at least were very close to death,’ Worsley wrote. ‘Indeed, it might be said that [Shackleton] kept a finger on each man’s pulse. Whenever he noticed that a man seemed extra cold and shivered, he would immediately order another hot drink of milk to be prepared and served to all. He never let the man know that it was on his account, lest he became nervous about himself.”

(Alexander, 147)

Before Shackleton left, he tied up all the loose ends with Wild.  He trusted Wild implicitly and knew that leaving him there was just the same as staying there himself.  He trusted him to keep morale high and to take care of the men.  The rest of the group intensely respected Wild. Wild and Shackleton reviewed what to do during the stay on Elephant Island including what to do if he did not return and numerous other issues.  Shackleton left his last instructions with Wild in a letter:

April 23rd, 1916 Elephant Island

Dear Sir

In the event of my not surviving the boat journey to South Georgia you will do your best for the rescue of the party.  You are in full command from the time the boat leaves this island, and all hands are under your orders.  On your return to England you are to communicate with the Committee.  I wish you, Lees & Hurley to write the book.  You watch my interests.  In another letter you will find the terms as agreed for lecturing you to do England Great Britain & Continent.  Hurley the U.S.A.  I have every confidence in you and always have had, May God prosper your work and your life.  You can convey my love to my people and say I tried my best.

Yours sincerely

E.H. Shackleton

So, who would you rather be?  Frank Wild staying on Elephant Island, or Ernest Shackleton, sailing to South Georgia?  Both had pretty horrendous duties, did they not?  Consider what Wild was facing:

“Wild’s responsibilities were unenviable.  He was in charge of the care of twenty-one demoralized, partially incapacitated, and perhaps rebellious men, with one man, Blackborow, gravely ill.  The deserted, barren rock on which they would have to live was, as they had slowly come to realize, daily raked by gale-force winds and blizzards.  They had insufficient clothing and no shelter.  They had no source of food or fuel except for penguins and seals, which could not be counted on to be around forever.  They were well beyond all shipping lanes.  If the James Caird was unsuccessful, there was, as Shackleton himself wrote, ‘no chance at all of any search being made…on Elephant Island.’”

(Alexander, 141)

“The island of South Georgia was 800 miles away – more than ten times the distance they had just traveled.  To reach it, a twenty-two-and-a-half-foot long open boat would have to cross the most formidable ocean on the planet, in the winter.  They could expect winds up to 80 miles an hour, and heaving waves – the notorious Cape Horn Rollers –measuring from trough to crest as much as sixty feet in height; if unlucky, they would encounter worse.  They would be navigating towards a small island, with no points of land in between, using a sextant and chronometer – under brooding skies that might not permit a single navigational sighting.  The task was not merely formidable; it was, as every sailing man of the company knew, impossible.” (Alexander, 132)

“Worsley had already distinguished himself as a navigator by landing the three boats safely on Elephant Island.  He had served for several years in the Pacific for the New Zealand Government Steamer Service, where he had become proficient in sailing small boats and navigating for landfalls on small islands.”(Alexander, 134)

“Wild wanted him to stay with him on Elephant Island; Shackleton wanted him in the Caird.  Everyone knew that this tough seaman, who had won the Albert Medal for bravery on Scott’s last expedition, would be an asset to any cause he served.  Crean was perhaps as close as one can come to being indestructible.”(Alexander, 134)

“…had never caused anyone a moment’s trouble, and he was universally liked. Shackleton picked him for no more complicated reasons than that he was an experienced seaman, and that he was built like a bull.”(Lansing, 188)

These profound words by Robert Greenleaf are coming true in the globally emerging “Society of Servant Leadership.” It is happening on college campuses. It is happening in companies and in nonprofit organizations. It is happening in customer service, supply chain projects, and performance transformation initiatives. It is happening in the sales and marketing world. It is happening in healthcare. It is happening in business schools and local communities and it is happening literally around the world.

The Servant Leadership Revolution is on. And you and me – we are fellow revolutionaries in the movement – united in pursuit of higher purpose, operations excellence, and a culture of everybody-win – the new standard of practice. Today there are approximately 250 significant organizations applying these principles and reaping the rich harvest of servant leadership – in three years will there be 2500?

A life science of management and leadership exposes the obsolete industrial age Taylor paradigm that still to this day is limiting so much individual and organizational performance. The Taylor model is based on Descartes’ 400 year old clockwork universe and does not  integrate new science discoveries of the last 100 years, especially quantum mechanics and complexity science. By recasting organizations as  living, complex-adaptive systems, an organization’s full capacity for Superperformance can finally be unleashed.

The traditional view of organization—woven together through a systematic framework of production, decision support,  knowledge, and information systems— is based on the model of a well-oiled machine engineered to deliver maximum performance derived from pre-defined parameters and specifications. This industrial age model considers performance a derivative of external controls defined by the designers of organizational systems. They have given only marginal importance to the self-adaptive and emergent nature of organizational systems and the dynamic environments they inhabit. In other words, they are still far from operating with an immune system of distributed decision rights and with management and leadership capacity distributed everywhere, to the very edge of organizations. These bottom-up, agile characteristics of living, complex adaptive systems are precisely what is needed during times of rapid changing operating and knowledge environments, such as those that exist today.

Nested Hierarchies are Natural

From Organism View the self-referencing fractal pattern of system inside of system is apparent. The parts and their environments are continually co-evolving. From this view there is perfect parallel between organization and organism, which present as a set of nested structures, each inside of the next, like Russian dolls.

Organization                                 Organism

Economy                                             Ecosystem
↓
Industry                                              Species
↓
Organization                                       Organism
↓
Function                                              Organ
↓
Department                                         Tissue
↓
Work Team                                        Cell
↓
Individual                                           Organelle

From Organism View the entire global economy can be seen as a gigantic ecology of interdependent and continually interacting (work) cells, organs, and organizations engaged in the production, buying and selling of goods and services. And like any ecology it is self-organizing, not centrally controlled or coordinated.

Regardless of scale or level of complexity, there is a corresponding compartment at every tier of the organization/organism hierarchy. This is not just a novel coincidence—it is the natural expression of order that pervades all of life, from ecosystem to economy. It is simply the most efficient way to organize.

In fact, throughout the entire text of  Darwin’s Origin of Species, the only illustration called for was the picture of a nested hierarchy.

Nested Hierarchy from Darwin's Origin of Species

Coincidentally stumbled upon this article which furthers the story of Galileo’s invention of the telescope and its groundbreaking implications.

http://bit.ly/3pZ2mK

In the same way, the view of organization as organism (not machine) supplants the century-old Taylor model and points to the incontrovertible need for a new guiding science for organizations – we need a life science not a machine science – it must be a science of management and leadership together.  The new biophysics of optimization – Superperformance science – weds biology and physics (nonequilibrium thermodynamics) to inform the transformation of flow and the emergence of culture.

The article includes a wonderful quote by physics pioneer Max Plank, “”A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die.”

The new optimization science of management & leadership – of complementarity – control  & liberation, will surely become implicit knowledge one day.

Sheng Zhao: “I am curious about emergence of leadership studies in the US. Looking back on the history, managers and management are the focal topics, but about two decades ago (as far as I know), leaders and leadership began to come into the front stage. What is the reason for the trend? Is it that management studies reach its end of the rope?  Or the social, technological and economical changes bewilder us and we need more direction (which way to go) than management?”

Dave Guerra: “In my opinion it all has to do with the growing revelation that what we losing our mechanistic tethering and moving toward an organic one. Organizations are alive, and as I shared with a young Chinese doctoral student, all of management and even mechanistically-based leadership theory are headed back to the future – to Bohr’s complementarity principle – to Yin and Yang. Our newtonian models have failed us – on the whole management science, much less practice, has been slow to adopt the major scientific discoveries of the last century, especially the last forty or so years. If quantum mechanics and nonequilibrium thermodynamics are true, then we should be able to appreciate them in a most ordinary and self-evident way.

After a life’s work of practical inquiry in the field, it has been my shocking discovery that there is indeed a pattern of harnessing opposites, tangible and intangible, that is the sweet spot of optimization. This is why servant leadership is the only leadership that works – because of the emergence of intrinsic motivation that it provokes – but it is also true that the control of outcomes – through statistical predictability, to quote Deming, is the only management that works – process management, that is. To my mind, if this is true, then there must be some underlying first order principle, some natural law, that is at work here. There is. It is the principle of complementarity, and it tells me we need a life science not a machine science to guide the next generation of organizational theory and practice.

Hence the current rage in leadership studies makes perfect sense, given the actual coming of age of Drucker’s knowledge economy, but my prediction is that ultimately we will find the truth is in the middle. Management and leadership must be treated as equivalent and complementary hemispheres, not separate and distinct provinces. They need eachother for completion. As Deming put it, “To manage, one must lead.”

So hence my message to my young Chinese inquisitor about “management and leadership” in the west, look backwards, from whence you came, to the harmony of yin and yang, because that is where we are headed. That’s my opinion and why ‘complexity leadership’ and ‘biology management’ are the best lens to inform us.

This is very exciting and in my experience at the front, very new.”

Dave Guerra

Sheng Zhao: “I admire greatly that a westerner can understand Yin Yan, and connect it with complexity. In fact many Chinese do not understand the deep meaning of Yin Yan. I find complexity, Yin Yan, and Budhism devle into a  similar worldview in the deep. I raised the question why the leadership studies rise in the US is out of my curiosity that the management studies in China are moving from leadership focus to manager focus, countering US’ trend.  I want to find out why they evolve differently.

Thank you for your insightful comments, and others for their contribution. All the questions, ideas, and opinions on the list help a little brain on the other side of the earth to vibrate more reasonably.”

Sheng Zhao

Superperformance is a next-generation performance optimization approach that turns conventional wisdom on its ear.

It introduces a new category. As a group, organizational Superperformers outperform the S&P 500 by a margin of almost 5 to 1. They dominate their industries, produce a steady stream of breakthrough operating results, reach coveted levels of customer delight, and are able to continually accelerate and make responsive every aspect of their operations–over exceedingly long periods.

These organizations share the same remarkable traits.

• They all prove the Superperformance Formula (PxC=SP) and harness the same natural laws.
• They all outperform their industry peers over exceedingly long periods.
• They all are led by Superperforming CEOs, who are true servant leaders.

This exciting new approach can be applied to transform performance on any scale in any organization. Superperformance directly challenges prevailing leadership and management paradigms–and rewires many traditional assumptions about organizations and how they operate.

We urgently need to transcend obsolete management practices and operating models and recast organizations as living, complex-adaptive systems–and performance as their emergent fruit. There are numerous real life examples of Superperformance- that when examined as a group -reveal an entirely new understanding of organizations and their hidden potential.

The evidence pulls back the skin of a new life science and  introduces a new biophysics of optimization.

The Triple Crown of 21st Century Operational Improvement Methods

As a result of the recent economic downturn, organizations are being driven to obtain greater visibility and control over their critical operational processes. Many have turned to continuous improvement (CI) as their primary approach to taming bulky processes. However, with more than 70% of organizations reporting increased financial pressure, CI teams are struggling to keep up with a growing appetite for accelerated operations improvement.

Organizations must acquire new knowledge and capabilities in the use of Lean, Agile, and Rapid Cycle Process Improvement methods, as well as identify best practices for integrating these critical new methodologies into all facets of their CI initiatives. They must not only acquire a practical appreciation for these critical new capabilities, but also be able to evaluate potential cultural risks associated with adopting these methods, assuring there is a complementary human dimension to blend with these essentially technical tools, which is a critical success factor for Superperformance.

This will lead them to:

• Understand the trends and best practices at the Superperformance frontier, in order to make informed decisions and gain competitive advantage,
• Identify and quantify the potential cost savings of adopting Lean, Agile and Rapid Cycle Process Improvement best practices,
• Apply learning in simulations and cases,
• Network with peers facing similar goals and challenges, and
• Develop an action plan to incorporate repeatable and predictable Lean, Agile, and Rapid Cycle Process Improvement methodologies into CI initiatives.

1 Simple Formula, 8 Simple Rules, One Billion Great Results

In this groundbreaking new book, Dave Guerra proposes a stunningly simple way through today’s complex world of work, introducing us to a new management science, showing how Superperformance springs from the intersection of an organization’s process and its passion. Guerra proposes a simple formula:

Process x Culture = Superperformance.

This book is about the phenomenal year-after-year success of companies who consistently apply this formula. It is about the simple rules that have enabled companies like Toyota, Southwest Airlines, Microsoft, Harley Davidson and others to achieve and sustain super results year after year.