Taking workplace lessons from life-or-death stories

Far and away the best book on management, leadership and employment I have read this year is “Deep Survival” by Laurence Gonzales.

I mention it now because I know that some of you, like me, will be heading off for a well-earned holiday and the last thing you need in your beach bag is yet another step-by-step guide to management and workplace relations.

Good holiday reading lets you lose yourself for a while and, hopefully, makes you think.

That’s why I recommend “Deep Survival.” It is not intended as a management book, although the author recognizes that many of its messages can be applied in business.

You won’t find diagrams or boxes or 10 tips for doing anything. You will find incredible stories of survival, however, accompanied by some sharp analysis of human behavior.

You won’t find many references to leadership either, and yet the whole book is about leadership -- the leadership that any one of us may need to discover in ourselves, sometimes hidden and unrecognized until events demand that we react.

Most of all it’s about change -- inevitably change for the worse, given its concentration on survival -- and the way people adapt to catastrophic reversals in their personal circumstances.

In some of Gonzales’ examples, the need to survive would never have occurred if people had digested warnings such as weather forecasts or had understood the implications of their actions at various times.

One walker, heading in to the mountains with a friend, falls behind his partner. Although he has a map, his friend has the compass. Instead of retracing his steps, the man heads into the wilderness, way off his planned route.

Only when he comes to terms with his predicament does he begin to start thinking of providing himself with the warmth and shelter he needs for survival.

There are echoes here of the story of the two mice in that ridiculously simplistic but bestselling book about workplace change, “Who Moved My Cheese?” by Spencer Johnson and Kenneth Blanchard, but Gonzales features real people attempting to survive, not fictional characters.

He suggests that three qualities are needed when dealing with change: perception, belief and then action. He writes about guessing well, leaning on our natural capacity for prediction.

“Training is an attempt to make predictions more accurate in a given environment,” he writes. “But as the environment changes (and it always does), what you need is versatility, the ability to perceive what’s really happening and adapt to it. So the training and prediction may not always be your best friend.”

Such behaviors were demonstrated in the twin towers attack in New York on Sept. 11, 2001. Some people stayed put, urged to do so in response to rehearsed safety procedures.

Others knew instinctively that something was happening beyond anything envisaged in the emergency manuals. In many cases, they were the ones who survived.

The workplace is not about survival, you may say. Isn’t it?

Try telling that to the thousands of people who have experienced layoffs. The lessons in this book, however, are less about staving off redundancy and more about making the best of changed circumstances.

People who survive adapt very quickly to their new environment. “Survival is adaptation and adaptation is change,” Gonzales writes, “but it is change based on a true reading of the environment.”

He writes of the transformation in attitude needed when moving from being a victim to being a survivor.

Surviving is about coming to terms with change, not clinging to your immediate past and going over old ground in a corrosive cycle of “if onlys.” If your ship has been wrecked and you have taken to a life raft, your new world is the raft and the sea, and you had better get used to it.

Survivors very quickly begin to model and map their real environment, says Gonzales. It’s important to discover what he calls the first rule of life: “Be here now.”

Opening a book such as this, it would be reasonable to expect to find parallels in risk management and indeed there are, but not the kind of management that stifles risk. Many of the people in these stories are living with risk every day of their lives, usually by choice.

Gonzales makes a case for living on the edge: “We can live a life of bored caution and die of cancer,” he writes. “Better to take the adventure, minimize the risk, get the information and then go forward in the knowledge that we have done everything we can.”

Anyone who has ever tried to understand the mind of the entrepreneur should read this book, because the survivor mentality it describes is not so far removed from that of the individual willing to take a calculated risk in business.

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Richard Donkin is a columnist for the Financial Times of London, in which this review first appeared.