Moby Dick’s Lessons on Business Leadership

Last weekend, I finished reading the Herman Melville classic, Moby Dick – and since then I’ve been ruminating on its subtle message that applies to business leadership and ethics.

For those who haven’t read the book – and I’m not sure I’d recommend it unless you have extreme tenacity (which is our hallmark here at Tenato) and patience – here’s the gist.

A young sailor joins the crew of a whaling ship – and it turns out to have an obsessed Captain, Ahab. Ahab’s single most important goal is to kill an infamous great, while whale, Moby Dick. His motivation is vengeance, because Ahab lost his leg in an attack by that very white whale years prior, when he once tried to slay the whale.

So, the story of Moby Dick is really told about a ship and its crew – which together are a kind of enterprise that includes about 30 crew members and an obsessed leader who insists on total loyalty.

It’s very much a business like any other, but in extreme circumstances. How so? Because once you’re on the high seas, you can’t just quit if you don’t like the captain’s practices.

In fact, the whalers in the story take risks, making heroic efforts to hand-spear other whales along their journey and process the flesh and oil into the ship’s storage holds.

But eventually their food and supplies run dangerously low, and the crew wants to turn back. However, they’ve still not located the one, special white whale who is the object of the Captain’s obsession.

This is where Captain Ahab insists on complete loyalty from the crew, not offering any compromises or exceptions, and continually elevating the stakes.

The crew tries desperately to persuade him, hoping to get help or rescue from passing ships. But Ahab refuses all.

Unfortunately, it’s like many a business I’ve come across over the years:

• Leadership that risks their employees’ safety – dragging them into treacherous working conditions at all costs, just to meet their own personal goals.
• Leadership that is hell-bent on vengeance toward a former employer or competitor. For example, when sales staff are pushed or receive higher bonuses for stealing those accounts.
• Leadership that won’t listen to cooler headed judgement – who won’t take outside advice, or even listen to the comments of employees and customers about what should be done.
• Leadership that assumes their own goals should be the goals of everyone, not considering who is helped or hurt by those goals.
• Leadership that makes empty promises, just to motivate employees.
• Leadership that makes ethically horrifying choices, to the oblivion of everyone else in the company.

So, here’s the thing. When I began this career in marketing, I soon realized that it was career from heaven, or the career from hell, depending on who I was marketing for. Much like being on that whaling ship. My experience was so repugnant with my early employers, I decided to sail my own ship.

But it’s not just the case for marketing personnel. It’s the case for everyone:

• Production staff who are pressed to work so fast, they risk their safety.
• Accounting staff who are told to cover up discrepancies in the books.
• HR Staff who have to sell the great working conditions or benefits that don’t exist.
• Legal staff who have to fight against customers who have every right to be compensated.
• Management staff who rally workers to keep pushing, well beyond reason.
• Payroll departments who keep quiet about unfair compensation practices.

So the message is this. If you’re not working for leadership you believe in and trust, it might be time to jump ship, and sail your own. Why? Because if good people work for good people, they win, and make the world a better place.

But even good people, when they working for obsessed or greedy people, are just helping to make the world more dystopic than they know.

I’ve also noticed that you can recognize crooked leaders quite easily – because they don’t really work hard themselves, they lean on others, and hard.

So if you’re getting leaned on, it could be that your boss has a symbolic leg missing – like Captain Ahab.

And hopefully, you’ll be able to get two feet planted under you, even just for yourself.

At least then, you’ll know you’ve got someone you can trust at the helm of your life.

If you’d like to chat with us more about this, contact us anytime.