Adrift in the South Pacific

Three leadership lessons we can learn without actually getting in a boat

By Derek Slater

August 08, 2011 — CSO —

I read two books this spring that recount nonfiction tales of people floating in the South Pacific.

In one book, it's by accident.

In the other, it's on purpose, but against the advice of everyone else on the planet.

The accidental cruise is described in the book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, by Nathaniel Philbrick. The whaling ship Essex sails from Nantucket harbor in 1819, rounds Cape Horn and enters the Pacific a year later, and is subsequently rammed twice and sunk by an angry 80-ton sperm whale. A thousand miles from land, the crew fills three small boats and tries to decide what to do.

Captain Pollard wants to stay with the west-bound Humboldt current to land in Tahiti. His subordinates, fearing tales of South Pacific cannibals, talk him into an attempt to steer further south into currents that will carry them back to the familiar shores of South America instead.

It doesn't go well.

The other book is Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft, by Thor Heyerdahl, written in the 1940s. Everyone should read this book. If it were fiction, you'd say it wasn't believable.

Based on sociological and archaeological evidence, Heyerdahl is convinced that the island people of the South Pacific arrived there not from the west (Asia), as the prevailing theory had it, but from the east (Peru).

His contemporaries tell him this is a stupid idea, as it would require people with Stone Age technology to sail or float 4,000 miles on balsawood raft. Which obviously they could not do.

So Heyerdahl builds a balsawood raft and makes the voyage himself. And it goes surprisingly well indeed.

As always, life's more extreme challenges provide lessons in leadership and character that apply to the more mundane situations of everyday work life.

1. Stick to your guns if you're acting on evidence. Heyerdahl's analysis of available evidence told him he was right. Everyone else told him he was crazy. His determination came not just from an obstinate streak, but also from looking at data from across a variety of scientific disciplines.

2. Put those guns back in the holster if you're basing conclusions on hearsay. If Pollard's crew had gone west, as he intended, most of them would likely have survived. His first and second mates won the argument by sticking to their guns (as in point one), but their certainty was based on very poor data. Security has a lot of best practices based on shaky data and conventional wisdom.

Sometimes that's all you have to work with, and you still have to act. But be aware of the possibility that completely new approaches may emerge. Don't be so dogmatic that you never challenge your own conclusions.

3. Whatever position you are arguing, and whatever course you set, always have a really good lifeboat.

Read more about security leadership in CSOonline's Security Leadership section.

Other stories by Derek Slater

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