Andrew Little, group managing director for the Melbourne unit of DDB, the advertising firm, has been strongly influenced by Shackleton in his own work with his team. Mr. Little read the case several years ago in a company-sponsored executive education course. “What I realized from the case is that as a leader, you have to have an unshakable faith in your mission, yourself and your abilities,” he said. “The hardest part of leadership is not just feeding your team with ideas and motivation, but feeding yourself. In the face of enormous obstacles, Shackleton found a way to do this.”

Just as important, Shackleton kept his men’s focus on the future. The ship was gone; previous plans were irrelevant. Now his goal was to bring the team home safely, and he improvised, adapted and used every resource at hand to achieve it.

When a few men expressed skepticism about his plans, he acted quickly to contain their opposition and negativity by trying to win them over and keeping close watch on them. He assigned several potential troublemakers to his own tent on the ice, proving the value of the saying, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

By April 1916, the ice began breaking up, and Shackleton ordered the men to the lifeboats, hoping to reach land along the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. After a week of stormy seas, they arrived at the deserted Elephant Island. They were exhausted, seasick and dehydrated. But they took “childish joy,” one scientist wrote in his diary, “in looking at the black rocks and picking up the stones, for we had stepped on no land since Dec. 5, 1914.”

Almost immediately, Shackleton began planning his next move. Along with five other men, he managed to guide a 22-foot lifeboat to South George Island; from there, a smaller party reached a whaling station and help. After a meal, a bath and a change of clothes, Shackleton said, “we had ceased to be savages and had become civilized men again.”

Then he began looking for a vessel capable of rescuing the rest of his crew. During the next several months, he set sail in three different ships, but none could cut through the pack ice surrounding Elephant Island. Finally, on Aug. 30, 1916, aboard the Yelcho, a Chilean steamer, Shackleton sailed within sight of the island and rescued the 22 remaining men. “I have done it,” he wrote his wife, Emily. “Not a life lost, and we have been through hell.”

Certainly, Shackleton was far from perfect, as executives and M.B.A. students often point out to me. He ordered the ship to sail south even in the face of whalers’ warnings about the pack ice. And the expedition might have fared better had he given more than sporadic attention to training his men how to manage and drive the 60-odd sled dogs on board.