I’ve been thinking about leadership over the past couple weeks in terms of how one may rise to the challenge of inspiring and motivating their teams… as well as how to avoid the Peter Principle of being promoted to a level of, well, incompetence.
And when you read about leaders who were so very incompetent, you wonder why they’re often more studied than leaders who succeed… because not all of these studies come from the perspective of cautionary tale.
That leads to my video for today, where Martin Guttman explores why incompetent leaders get so much attention and even celebration… and his comparison of Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen, two polar explorers with noticeably different track records, is illuminating (you can glean some of it from the title image).
There’s a personal resonance for our family as well, who were duty-bound to learn about notable Norwegians… so it probably comes as no surprised that I find Amundsen to be very underrated. It also shouldn’t surprise folks that I like the idea of leadership being ‘boring.’ I am as certain that leadership can be inspirationally boring as I am certain the drama belongs on stage or screen, not the office (or exploring).
In case you want to learn more about Scott and Amundsen and the race for the South Pole, there’s an older miniseries called The Last Place on Earth that, per this posting, is available on Amazon Prime, Freevee, Pluto, Roku, and Tubi.