I’m in with the “In” crowd

Gene Mage

The tenth installment of the series “Elephants in the office” deals with the problem of parochialism. For installments 1-9 visit www.makingitwork.com.

I´m in with the "In" crowd

I go where the "In" crowd goes

I´m  in with the "In" crowd

And I know what the "In" crowd knows

We make ev'ry minute count

Our share is always the biggest amount

Billy Page had it right when he wrote the words to the song, The ‘In’ Crowd.  When the tune comes wafting in over the airwaves on your favorite oldies station you tap our toes to the beat, never really hearing the words.

Have you been part of the ‘In’ Crowd lately?  It feels good to rub shoulders with all the right people.  It’s a heady rush to see and be seen in all the right places.  I would argue that being ‘In’ is positively addictive.

But as with most addictions the pleasure carries with it an inevitable dark side.  In the professional world, ‘In’ crowds are both attractive and deadly.

I was reminded of this principle last summer when I read Nathaniel Philbrick’s intriguing little book, In the Heart of the Sea.  The year was 1819, the place was Nantucket, and business was whaling.  And in the business of whaling, Nantucketers were the uncontested ‘In’ crowd.

Nantucketers lived, loved, and whaled with an almost tribal devotion to one-another.  Perhaps the Nantucketers’ sense of loyalty grew out of their island geography and common ancestry.  Maybe those bonds were forged through the shared experience of persevering and prevailing through great difficulty.  Whatever the roots, that bond was real and powerful.

You may, with good reason, view that sense of mutual support and commitment with respect, or even admiration.  Yet when put to the test in the laboratory of leadership, the parochial perspective proved to be highly destructive.

When the whale ship Essex was sunk by a rogue whale [the historical events that underpin Melville’s fictional Moby Dick] twenty crew members were aboard.  After a harrowing journey on the open sea only eight crew members survived.  All were Nantucketers; they survived by eating the bodies of their shipmates.

Days after the wreck, Captain George Pollard, First Mate Owen Chase, and Second Mate Matthew Joy gathered to discuss which way to sail their little whale boats to find safety after the loss of their ship.  The choices were to sail with the wind westward towards Tahiti and other inhabited islands, or eastward towards the coast of South America, a far longer and more difficult trip on the open ocean.  Commenting on their decision process Philbrick writes, “Only a Nantucketer in November 1820 possessed the necessary combination of arrogance, ignorance, and xenophobia to shun a beckoning (albeit unknown) island and choose instead an open-sea voyage of several thousand miles.”

Pollard, against his better judgment, went along with Chase and Joy’s proposal to travel east.  That breakdown in leadership, putting harmony over survival, was a death sentence for twelve sailors.  An unhealthy enmeshment with the group outweighed both reason and common sense.

Philbrick contrasts this “clubby” style of leadership with that of Earnest Shackleton, who in equally dire circumstances exercised an extraordinary balance between the willingness to stand alone and the imperative to create harmony.  The result was the rescue of every man.

Can we learn something from this historical tidbit?

1.             Effective leaders transcend parochial boundaries.  We must not define success in any other way than that of the enterprise.

2.             Effective leaders are willing, when necessary, to go against the group.  At times, the imperative to speak up outweighs the imperative to maintain “civility”.

3.             Effective leaders avoid settling for known perils over unknown opportunities.  While it may have been frightening to consider sailing to mysterious inhabited islands, the “safe” route that they knew so well proved to be the Nantucketers' undoing.

Heading for the beach?  Pick up Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea, New York, Penguin Books, 2000.

Syndicated columnist Gene C. Mage is author of the book Managing for High Performance. To contact Gene, visit www.makingitwork.com.

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