After several attempts and four months, they return to rescue the remaining 22 men, all of whom are alive. From there, in April 1916, he and five others travel in a lifeboat back to South Georgia Island, where they cross the uncharted interior to secure help at a whaling station. With his men’s survival, not Antarctica, as his new goal, Shackleton mounts several failed rescue attempts, the last of which gets his crew to uninhabited Elephant Island. Ten months later, in October 1915, the ship suffers irreparable damage by the massive ice floes and sinks Shackleton and his crew abandon ship and camp on the ice. Although Antarctica is within sight, the ice floes carry the Endurance off course, away from land. – Nancy Koehn, HBS Professor of Business AdministrationĮndurance is frozen solid in ice. is leading under moments of great uncertainty when the game is changing, and may change on a dime.’ ‘Part of what the Shackleton story is about. They head south from South Georgia Island, a whaling outpost, despite warnings of pack ice, and within a month, the Shackleton and a crew of 27 men set out to be the first to traverse Antarctica. It is 1914, the peak of Europe’s fascination with polar exploration and the eve of Britain’s involvement in World War I.
What’s more, as movies and books have demonstrated in the past decade, the voyage of the ship Endurance makes for a grippingly good story. “It has both inspirational lessons and things we don’t want to do.” It’s this duality, she says, that makes Shackleton such a compelling case, knocking him off a mythologized pedestal and into the messy stew of humanity, where good and bad, success and failure coexist. “How he did what he did is very instructive,” says Koehn of the now celebrated explorer and leader of a heroic expedition that saw all 28 members survive despite several years of harsh conditions and devastating, potentially deadly, setbacks. She has created and taught a business case called “Leadership in Crisis: Ernest Shackleton and the Epic Voyage of the Endurance.” Yet Ernest Shackleton and his ill-fated Antarctic expedition have much to teach modern business leaders, says Harvard Business School (HBS) Professor of Business Administration Nancy Koehn.
A mariner whose ship sank miles from its destination in some of the world’s most hostile seas. He was an Antarctic explorer who never got near the South Pole.
Nancy Koehn cites Shackleton’s flexibility: ‘He’s not afraid to bend the rules, or break them when he needs to.’ (Staff photo Jon Chase/Harvard News Office)
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