Quotes Database

«No one was getting the whole picture, thank God, ... But confiding in each of them was the only way for me to handle the loneliness of command, which is very, very real.»

«[If that were to happen, the crew quite possibly would have lost both its skipper and its rig to the world's harshest seas. Why take on such a risk?] Because I was young, I was fit, but most importantly, I was a member of the team, ... And sending me up there was the best use of the team's resources. So I did it.»

«[The most challenging sailing was in the Southern Ocean. But the leadership challenge was comparatively easy.] It was muck and bullets -- battleground leadership, ... These guys were hanging on by their fingernails. As long as I was technically competent, leading was pretty straightforward.»

«But then I noticed two of the guys standing on the foredeck,»

«We were out there in the Southern Ocean, feeling very insignificant in a big part of the planet, ... At any minute, another storm would sweep in. We hatched a plan: Spike and I would climb up and jury-rig the fitting. As we started the climb, I told the crew that they must helm the yacht very carefully on the opposite tack, as the rigging was only holding up one side of the mast. If the helmsman made a mistake while we were up on the mast, we'd crash down over the side with the entire rig on top of us.»

«[They turned east and, soon after, lost the bet. The wind dropped, they missed the most favorable position to cross the Doldrums, and they slipped to eleventh place. Fed up with the conditions, members of the crew began to lose faith in their strategy. One crew member complained that he had wasted three years of his life training for the race. The solution was to reset the goal.] I called the crew up on deck, and we discussed what had happened, ... 'We're in the eleventh position,' I told them. 'We can't think about winning. We're going to set ourselves new targets to beat as many boats as we can, one boat at a time.'»

«[The first goal: Pass the tenth-place boat, which was five miles ahead of the Toshiba Wave Warrior, within the next 12 hours. The crew members did it. Then, they overtook the next boat and the one after that. Some 1,000 miles later, the Wave Warrior stormed into Boston in third place.] The race was all about learning: The team that learned the fastest would win, ... My ambition was for the crew to learn so well that they wouldn't need me. I really feel that a leader's goal should be to make himself redundant.»

«Some of the other boats did everything exactly the same way, from start to finish. On our boat, there wasn't a single operation at the end of the race that we did the same way as in the beginning. You were learning, changing, and evolving all the time. If you weren't, you were dead.»

«Mike and I barely talked during the race,»

«I wanted my team to specialize in particular areas and stick with particular functions, but that wasn't me. And Mike wanted to be more sensitive to his team and be more collaborative, but that wasn't him. Ultimately, it's not a matter of which style works better than the other. It all comes down to which style works best for you.»