“From the sentimental point of view, it is the last great Polar journey that can be made.

It will be a greater journey than the journey to the Pole and back, and I feel it is up to

the British nation to accomplish this, for we have been beaten at the conquest of the

North Pole and beaten at the conquest of the South Pole. There now remains the largest

and most striking of all journeys – the crossing of the Continent.” (Alexander, p.9)

“In appearance, the Endurance was beautiful by any standard. She was a barkentine – three masts, of which the forward one was square-rigged, while the after two carried fore-and-aft sails, like a schooner. She was powered by coal-fired, 350-hp steam engine, capable of driving her at speeds of up to 10.2 knots. She measured 144 feet over-all, with a 25-foot beam, which was not overbig, but big enough. And though her sleek black hull looked from the outside like that of any other vessel of a comparable size, it was not.

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“Her keel members were four pieces of solid oak, one above the other, adding up to a total thickness of 7 feet, 1inch. Her sides were made from oak and Norwegian mountain fir, and they varied in thickness from about 18 inches to more than 2 ½ feet. Outside this planking, to keep her from being chafed by the ice, there was a sheathing from stem to stern of greenheart, a wood so heavy it weighs more than solid iron and so tough that it cannot be worked with ordinary tools. Her frames were not only doublethick, ranging from 9 ¼ to 11 inches, but they were double in number, compared with a conventional vessel.

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“Her bow, where she would meet the ice head on, had received special attention. Each of the timbers there had been fashioned from a single oak tree especially selected so that its natural growth followed the curve of her design. When assembled, these pieces had a total thickness of 4 feet, 4 inches.” (Lansing, 17-18)

During the march back from 88 degrees south, one of Shackleton’s three companions, Frank Wild, who had not begun the expedition as a great admirer of Shackleton, recorded in his diary an incident that changed his mind forever. Following an inadequate meal of pemmican and pony meat on the night of January 31, 1909, Shackleton had privately forced upon Wild one of his own biscuits from the four that he, like the others, was rationed daily. “I do not suppose that anyone else in the world can thoroughly realize how much generosity and sympathy was shown by this,” Wild wrote, underlining his words. “I DO and by GOD I shall never forget it. Thousands of pounds would not have bought that one biscuit.”

(Alexander, 13.)

Of Rogue Waves and Leadership – by Jodi Guerra

He was born in 1874 in Ireland the second of ten children. His family had a Quaker background and had immigrated to Ireland from Yorkshire.  There were ten children in Shackleton’s family. He had nine siblings-eight sisters and one brother. His father, Henry Shackleton, was a landowner and farmer, but with Ireland’s diastrous potato crops, he knew that supporting his large family by farming would not be possible. When Ernest was six years old, Henry Shackleton moved the family to Dublin, Ireland and began his medical studies at Trinity College. He was thirty-three years old at the time. After finishing his medical training, Henry Shackleton moved the family from Dublin to London, England where he began his career as a doctor. His mother was a happy, strong, somewhat non-traditional woman. Altogether, his upbringing was comfortable, upper-middle class, stable and rather spiritual in that the Bible was read aloud.  He was homeschooled until he was around 10 and the family moved to London.

“The long days of white silence, the unrelenting tedium and hardship, the unrelieved close quarters – all these factors must have shredded the men’s nerves. Wilson appears to have been forced to act as peacemaker on more than one occasion. Years later, Scott’s second-in-command told the story that after breakfast one day Scott had called to the other men, “Come here, you bloody fools.” Wilson asked if he was speaking to him, and Scott replied no. “Then it must have been me,” said Shackleton. “Right, you’re the worst bloody fool of the lot, and every time you dare to speak to me like that, you’ll get it back.” It is a surreal encounter, a piece of absurd theater – three men alone at the ends of the earth in a virtual whiteout, hissing at one another.” (Alexander, Caroline. The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.)

Inevitably, then, ships encounter waves that exceed their stress rating. In the dry

terminology of naval architecture, these are called “non-negotiable waves.” Mariners

call them “rogue waves” or “freak seas.” Typically they are very steep and have an

equally steep trough in front of them – a “hole in the ocean” as some witnesses have

described it. Ships cannot get their bows up fast enough, and the ensuing wave breaks

their back. Maritime history if full of encounters with such waves. When Sir Ernest

Shackleton was forced to cross the South Polar Sea in a 22-foot open life boat, he saw a

wave so big that he mistook its foaming crest for a moonlit-cloud. He only had time to

yell, “Hang on, boys, it’s got us!” before the wave broke over his boat. Miraculously,

they didn’t sink. In February 1883, the 320-foot steamship Glamorgan was swept bow to-stern by an enormous wave that ripped the wheelhouse right off the deck, taking all the ship’s officers with it. She later sank. …. In 1976, the oil tanker Cretan Star radioed, “vessel was struck by a huge wave that went over the deck…” and was never

heard from again. The only sign of her fate was a four-mile oil slick off Bombay…  (Junger, Sebastian. The Perfect Storm. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.)

As a member of the Discovery team, Shackleton was among the first to attempt to reach

the South Pole, or even to venture inland from the Antarctic coast. He was the first to

discover vegetation on a remote Antarctic island. His Nimrod expedition located the

magnetic South Pole, invaluable for navigational charts. He was the first to find coal in

the Antarctic, altering how scientists saw the makeup and the origins of the continent.

He pioneered innovations in exploration packing, clothing, diet, transport, and equipment.

(Morrell, Margot and Stephanie Capparell. Shackleton’s Way: Leadership Lessons

from the Great Antarctic Explorer. New York: Viking, 2001).

“When disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.”

“For a joint scientific and geographical piece of organization, give me Scott; for a winter journey, give me Wilson; for a dash to the Pole and nothing else, Amundsen; and if I am in the devil of a hole and want to get out of it, give me Shackleton every time.”

“I have served with Scott, Shackleton and Mawson, and have met Nansen, Amundsen, Peary, Cook, and other explorers, and in my considered opinion, for all the best points of leadership, coolness in the face of danger, resource under difficulties, quickness in decisions, never-failing optimism, and the faculty of instilling the same into others, remarkable genius for organization, consideration for those under him, and obliteration of self, the palm must be given to Shackleton, a hero and a gentleman in very truth.”

Excerpt from The Superpeforming CEO
From Chapter 14:  Distributed Being

If you look into nature, into these places of community, you will find an amazing degree of alignment; there is a beautiful, symmetrical pattern. No friction, no member out of alignment—the flow is seamless. These organisms all behave intelligently, even though their members are unaware of the big picture and there is no “central controller” to guide them. According to futurist and complexity author Kevin Kelly, they are out of control—a state he describes as “distributed being.” Since this is the preferred operating mode of complex biological forms that have thrived for millions of years, Kelly suggests that our own increasingly complex organizations will inevitably follow the same pattern. In the simplest terms, they solve problems by drawing on masses of relatively simple and locally autonomous agents, rather than a single, super-intelligent executive branch. They are bottom-up, self-organizing systems. In the language of complexity science, they are complex adaptive systems (CAS) displaying emergent features.

For organizations, reaching anywhere close to this level of performance is only possible in a decentralized environment. But decentralization of decision rights requires corresponding levels of personal responsibility.

Agile project teams are an excellent example.

George: “Birds flocking, fish schooling, bees swarming, all move effortlessly in the same direction, it is a more efficient way to forage and travel, the whole uses less energy to operate in this way. Somehow great teams and great organizations are able to operate as something approaching this ‘frictionless’ state. There is something extra–something invisible at work.

“Some companies become fossilized by centralizing all authority. This is suboptimal. Decisions have to be made as close to the customer as possible, at the lowest level of knowledge and skill. Organizations are patterns of relationships. Conversations are the heart and soul of organizational life. Conversations shape commitment to the organization and create a sense of what is possible. Like Buckminster Fuller’s trimtab on the rudder of a ship, conversations seem insignificant, but have tremendous hidden power. Conversations characterize everyday work life and negotiations between people in the organization and their customers. They determine the quality of service and the overall effectiveness of the company. In many organizations, conversations are negative and blocked or fall into otherwise destructive loops.

“Change cannot be imposed or controlled from the top or from the outside. It is better to work with people at all company levels to help them discover for themselves what is possible and what can be done better. This helps to facilitate new conversations, which often cross boundaries within organizations. By focusing on those conversations at the core of the organization, the greatest leverage can be created, for executives working on strategy, teams working on projects, the whole organization working on its next transformation, or any other critical business function. Systems, structures and processes all help the effective organization, but they count for little if the conversations and relationships are not real. Imposing command-and-control solutions to business problems, especially around knowledge work, has proven to be almost completely ineffective.”

(From Creating and Sustaining Superperfomance by Barbara Brown, Examiner.com)

A Better Leadership Paradigm

At the launch of The Superperforming CEO Book Tour & Seminar in Houston last week, Superperforming CEO George Martinez,  in “An Uncommon View” and Complexity Guru Chris Welsh in “Escape from Flatland” both shared brilliant illustrations about the experience of a paradigm shift.  Both referred to Superperformance as the discovery of a true advance in contemporary business thinking and optimization practice.

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.

Yes the evidence is that Superperformance  is available to all. But today’s lingering, strictly mechanistic models of management and leadership only take things further in the wrong direction. New knowledge and methods are needed to transcend these caveman paradigms.

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.

In the perfect complement to his groundbreaking first book, Superperformance, Dave Guerra examines the world’s most successful CEOs, unveiling a priceless set of 15 unconventional distinctions in an unmistakable portrait of servant leadership in action.

Release Date: Fall 2009

Find It Online At: www.amazon.com

Learn More about Servant Leadership and Superperformance at the 19th Annual International Servant Leadership