Shackleton's Way of Leading through Disaster

Forty years after Endurance sank, physicist Reginald James wrote to Shackleton's biographer...

“There was nothing in the nature of a set speech. He spoke to us in a group, telling us that he intended to march the party across the land to the west; that the distance was about 200 miles and that he thought we ought to manage 5 miles a day and that if we all worked together it could be done. The necessity seemed obvious. At heart we were probably glad that the time of anxiety as to whether or not we should save the ship was over, and that the job was not up to us. I can’t remember the matter being discussed or argued in any way. We were in a mess, and the Boss was the man who could get us out. It is a measure of his leadership that this seemed almost axiomatic.”

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