With heavy heart, I snap an ammunition clip into my Webley Vickers automatic and lead a trusted life-long companion out for a last walk in the woods.
My companion is the memory of Ernest Henry Shackleton (1874-1922), Antarctic explorer. It's time to put the Boss out of his misery because he's been adopted as a role model for managers of IT projects in government departments, local authorities and the NHS. Go to any conference presentation with the word leadership in the title - there are dozens - and, sooner or later, up pops a slide of men pulling a sledge.
In the commercial world, the cult of leadership seems to be in eclipse, after a run of scandals involving overpaid chief executives. In government, which lags a couple of years behind industry when it comes to management fads, it's still going strong.
The trouble is that leadership, by definition, relies on exemplars. And most of the outstanding leader personalities from history are, to put it mildly, dodgy role models for civil service managers. A motivational consultant preaching "leadership secrets of Napoleon" would be written off as slightly bonkers, even in France. Anyone doing the same with Hitler would, I hope, be locked up.
Edwardian polar explorers apparently offer safer material. While several were maniacs, their victims were willing volunteers and wealthy, vain, funders. In general, the world's a richer place because of people like Amundsen, Scott and Mawson (who tends to be the favourite of people who've actually had penguin poo on their boots).
And the Boss, the charismatic Anglo-Irishman whose story of survival in the 1914-16 transantarctic expedition deservedly remains a classic. But let's not get carried away. The reason why Shackleton's qualities of leadership are remembered, and proselytised in best-sellers such as Shackleton's Way: Leadership Lessons from the Great Antarctic Explorer, is because his professional life was a disaster.
Like his rival Scott, he never mastered the technicalities of ice and snow travel. His three independent expeditions all failed. Even the myth that Shackleton brought all his men back alive is untrue. Three men died in the ill-organised, though undoubtedly heroic, journey to set up supply depots for his doomed Antarctic crossing.
Certainly, this is the kind of operational record we have come to expect in government IT projects. But is it really what we want for the future?
If we're to look to the past for Antarctic exemplars in project management, we'd do better to follow the dour Amundsen who, through relentless preparation and organisation, achieved two firsts: navigating the northwest passage and reaching the South Pole.
This is not to knock leadership. Anyone who has worked in well-led and badly-led organisations will know the difference. But we should pick our exemplars with care. As role models for the IT-enabled reform of British public services, even the most brilliant Edwardian polar adventurers are about as useful as Walter Mitty.
