What can businesses learn from Ernest Shackleton and Elon Musk? Always have a Plan B

By Michael Stone, chairman and co-founder of Beanstalk and author of, 'The Power of Licensing: Harnessing Brand Equity'

A handful of important, recent events have reminded me how important it is for business leaders to always have a Plan B.

First, last March, the wreck of Ernest Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, which was crushed in Antarctic pack ice in 1915 during the explorer’s historic attempt to be the first to cross Antarctica, was found in 10,000 feet of polar ice in remarkably preserved condition.

Second, we are still living with the effects of a global pandemic that, over the past almost three years, has changed our lives in ways that we thought were unimaginable.

And third, over the past month or so, our collective heads are spinning as we try to understand what Elon Musk is doing at and to Twitter. One of the more important lessons for executive leaders from each of these events is the need to always have a Plan B. Even as you execute Plan A, start thinking about Plan B. Sometimes Plan B is simply to try harder at Plan A, but don’t count on that. Just ask Shackleton and Musk.

The Shackleton pivot

One of the best business lectures that I have ever heard was, ‘The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times’, given by Harvard Business School Professor Nancy Koehn, who used Shackleton’s pivot to Plan B as a lesson on leadership.

Ernest Shackleton was one of the great explorers in the early 20th Century. In 1915, his ship, the Endurance, froze in the icy waters off Antarctica - the result of an unexpected Southern wind. With the wooden sailing ship stuck in the ice, the expedition, consisting of Shackleton and 27 hardy souls, drifted 15 months waiting for the ice to melt. But as the ship slowly broke apart, the men were forced to set up camp on the ice for five months. Eventually, under pressure from the moving ice, the ship slowly and finally sank.

That first night, without the ship and living on the open ice, with two open lifeboats and provisions taken from the sinking ship, Shackleton wrote in his diary, “A man must shape himself to a new mark directly the old one goes to ground.” That was an elegant way to say that he recognized the need for a Plan B. Plan A, to be the first to cross Antarctica, went down with the ship. But Shackleton’s leadership and quick pivot to Plan B resulted in the miraculous rescue of his entire crew, which included a trek across the ice to a deserted rocky spit of land named Elephant Island, an 800-mile trip in an open life boat with five of the crew across the treacherous Southern Ocean, battling heavy winds, thirst and frostbite, to the island of South Georgia, where he waited to secure a ship to return for the rest of his men, four months after leaving them, and who were all waiting where he had left them, more than two years after the Endurance had set sail.

The pandemic pivot

So many businesses had to devise a Plan B in quick order. Think about restaurants which could no longer allow indoor dining, retailers which were no longer inviting places for consumers to shop, supermarkets, museums, movie theaters, nail salons, warehouses, amusement parks, and businesses that could no longer allow employees to come to the office. Talk about Plan A going awry; a Plan A that we comfortably thought was simply the normal way to conduct business. We never thought that we needed a Plan B for that Plan A. Remember thinking that the coronavirus would last two or three weeks? Who needs a Plan B? But we did and we needed it relatively quickly. And many business segments were ready. One of the best illustrations of the pivot to Plan B is brick and mortar retail.

In many respects, pre-pandemic, the death march was already playing for many brick and mortar retailers who were slow to react to the e-commerce tidal wave and many went out of business during the pandemic as Plan B was out of their reach. But for those that survived, the pandemic accelerated changes that were overdue and already afoot. Those retailers were quick to pivot and respond to consumers who were now stuck at home, doing much more online shopping and who had more cash available because they weren’t doing things like traveling and eating out.

Plan B for the successful brick and mortar retailers was to rapidly up their game in technology, improve online delivery service, develop easy curbside pick-up, introduce no contact payment options, and make store associates more accessible online and by phone, among other changes. Virtually all these changes in how brick and mortar retail connect with consumers have remained in place as we emerge from the pandemic. This unprecedented event forced retailers to execute Plan B, and some are already saying that Plan B was their savior.

We are living in a new world, a world characterized by Plan B in reaction to the pandemic across virtually every business and industry sector.

Elon Musk’s mess at Twitter

I actually think Musk had a Plan A, although only he truly knows. He wanted to gut the workforce and transform Twitter into a digital global town square, thereby rescuing free speech. He fashioned himself as the savior of Twitter, presenting ambitious business plans and projections to potential investors. He didn’t really think it through. His Plan A sank almost as fast as Shackleton’s ship and, as he runs Twitter into the ground, he seems to be making it up as he goes along, searching for a Plan B. Given his lofty opinion of himself, he never considered that he might need a Plan B.

He offered to buy Twitter, reneged on the deal, was sued and then, under threat of a court battle, closed the deal on October 27th.

At an alarming pace, he then fired the senior management, the board and half of the 7,500 employees. Realizing that perhaps he might have acted a bit hastily, he tried to get some folks back. Then he said that employees had to work in the office. Then he said, well maybe not. Then he said that employees had to commit to working “extremely hardcore… [with] long hours at high intensity,” or take a severance package. At least 1,200 took the package. And, of course, he keeps talking about the subscription fee for Twitter Blue.

Advertisers recognized that the job cuts would impact the ability of Twitter to control harmful content and prevent data breaches. Indeed, he recently announced that he would broadly restore banned accounts (including Donald Trump). With 90% of revenues coming from advertisers, Musk really didn’t consider the impact all this would have, and many companies put their advertising on hold. To lure them back, Musk tried to assure them about content and brand integrity with a proposed moderation council.

It’s been challenging, to put it mildly. And, of course, there are all sorts of regulations with which he must comply, both in the US and, particularly, abroad. And don’t forget the Apple and Google app stores upon which Twitter relies for a fair amount of users and which have their own standards. A fight with Apple is already brewing. His unmoderated free-for-all isn’t taking off. Musk is lurching from one strategy to the next. And while there are those who believe that he will yet pull it off, he needs a well thought out Plan B.

Learnings

What have we learned from Ernest Shackleton’s epic voyage and tale of survival, Elon Musk’s head-spinning early days at Twitter and the many business and consumer pivots due to the pandemic? Always be thinking of Plan B. That means that businesses need to actually build a Plan B and build business-resilience for the future.

The potential for Plan A to fail is usually (but not always) foreseeable and, yet, when Plan A fails, it usually happens relatively quickly and, for some reason, surprises us. As leaders, we need to think about what risks could await us, what our plan is to address those risks and what actions we will take if actually faced with those challenges. It’s also leadership’s responsibility to evaluate how we responded to the challenges with which we were confronted over the past two-plus years. What did we, as leaders, do well? Where did we fail or were slow to act? What were the gaps in our response to the drastically changed conditions? When changed conditions are presented again in the future, how will we turn those changed conditions – which will likely surprise us – into opportunities? And what processes, infrastructure, and organization will we have in place to act?

We can’t just put it all behind us. Something will likely happen again, either to the world or to our particular business sector, or limited to our particular business. It’s all about being prepared. Understanding what we have learned and what other leaders have taught us either from their successes or their failures. It’s all about having a Plan B.