As a bookworm and bibliophile, I worm my way around during book fairs looking out for not just bargains but also gems that I can find. One book which I bought last year for only RM9.90 is “Shackleton’s Way” written by Margot Morrell and Stephanie Capparell with a preface written by Alexandra Shackleton.

A year before that, I had seen the book priced at RM70 and then the price went down to RM30.90 and finally I got it at a 70% discount off that price!

Never in my life did I dream that this book would offer me a rich abundance of lessons for meeting the leadership challenges that one can encounter in life.

A thrilling survival story, “”Shackleton’s Way” makes an inspirational handbook for a new generation of leaders.

He has been called the greatest leader that ever came on God’s earth, bar none. In 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton led twenty-seven men, for almost two years, through a harrowing fight for their lives after the wreck of their Antarctic vessel, Endurance, left them stranded on an ice floe twelve hundred miles from civilization with no means of communication and no hope for rescue.

The temperatures were so low that men could hear water freeze. They subsisted on a diet of penguins, dogs and seals. And when the ice began to break up, Shackleton set out to save them all on his heroic eight-hundred-mile trip across the frigid South Atlantic - in little more than a rowboat.

Unlike most other polar expeditions, every man survived not only in good health but also in good spirits and every man ascribed it to Shackleton’s superb leadership.

Nearly a century later, this once-overlooked explorer is riding a wave of “Shackleton mania.” Yet nowhere have the secrets of Shackleton’s leadership success been fully analyzed. Shackleton’s Way draws on anecdotes, crew diaries, contemporary material, and interviews with some of today’s leaders to illustrate Shackleton’s tactics.

This book offers readers opportunities to learn how to manage crises with limited personnel and resources, how to create order out of chaos, how to hire good workers, how to support and inspire employees to do their best, and how to lead by personal example–with optimism, egalitarianism, humor, strength, ingenuity, intelligence, and compassion. Shackleton’s Way is a fascinating and practical case study of a leader who triumphed by putting people first and striving for the seemingly impossible when all the odds were against him.

Margot Mowell and Stephanie Capparell have turned Shackleton’s effective methods into a leadership handbook that reads like an adventure story!!! What is brilliant about this book is that the authors have shown me how successful readers have patterned themselves on the incomparable Antarctic explorer. Better still, they have successfully codified his winning strategies for the rest of us.

You must get your hands on this book because Shackleton’s story captures the true essence of leadership to help each person achieve his best in order to achieve what some view as the impossible.

Certainly, the lessons in this book are timeless and invaluable. Please do not miss out on the opportunity to benefit from these timeless lessons.

Happy reading, enjoy the rest of the day!