Endurance

Lansing reconstructs Ernest Shackleton's 1914 to 1916 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, in which the ship Endurance was trapped in pack ice in the Weddell Sea, drifted for ten months, was crushed and sank, and the twenty-eight men survived for a further year on ice floes and on Elephant Island before rescue. Nobody died. Lansing interviewed surviving expedition members and used their diaries, which is why the account carries detail no later reconstruction could match.

The leadership material is why the book is read outside the adventure category. Shackleton abandoned the expedition's original objective immediately once the ship was lost and redefined the goal as bringing everyone home. He managed morale deliberately, assigning tents to separate potential troublemakers and keeping the men he considered problematic close to himself. He maintained routines including regular meals, sleeping schedules and organised recreation while the situation deteriorated. He enforced equality of rations and physical labour regardless of rank, including having officers scrub floors.

The operational decisions include the sledging attempts across the ice, the retreat to the boats, the passage to Elephant Island, and the eight hundred mile open boat journey to South Georgia in a twenty-two foot lifeboat, followed by the first crossing of the island's interior.

Lansing wrote in 1959 and the book is narrative history without analysis. The leadership lessons must be extracted by the reader, and the situation differs from business in ways that limit transfer, particularly that the men could not leave. The account of Shackleton changing the objective the moment the original became impossible is the part with the widest application.