EARLE DE BLONVILLE, FRGS 

Explorer, Author, Educator, C-Suite Coach, Corporate Consultant.

Fellow: Royal Geographical Society, UK
Adjunct Professional Fellow, SCU, Australia
Scientific Collaborator: LAB, University of Catalonia, Spain

Leader: First Australian Arctic Expedition, East Greenland
Leader: First British Australian Exploration Cruise, Arctic
Leader: First Australian Exploration, West Greenland
Leader: First northerly sea kayak crossing of Bass Strait
Co-leader: First sea kayak circumnavigation of Tasmania
Chief Leader: ANZSES Expedition Granite Mountain
Director: Australian Bicentenary Tall Ships Spectacular
Author: 'SAVAGE COAST - Inside Australia's First Arctic Expedition'

“Earle de Blonville is a great, but unsung, Australian hero, with outstanding leadership qualifications." 
- Professor The Hon. Barry Jones, AC. Minister for Science 1983-90

PROFESSIONAL ADVENTURE CAREER
He is unique on the Leadership world stage for the breadth and depth of his practical leadership experience, gained over five decades. He worked as a professional mountain instructor in Scotland, the Lake District, and North Wales. His assignments included training long-term youth recidivists in sub-Arctic conditions, adventure mountain training for young industry leaders, and remote mobile expeditions with international participants, plus adventure curriculum development, adventure centre management and staff technical training.

INTERNATIONAL EXPERIENCE
His extensive field leadership experience includes adventures in the Himalayas, Greece, Austria, Italy and the Australian Alps; scientific expeditions in the Kimberley and East Gippsland; and multi-year maritime exploration of largely uncharted Arctic coasts in Greenland.

CORPORATE EDUCATION PROGRAMS
In the corporate sector, he has developed executive leadership education programs, consulted on leadership communications strategies, and coached many C-Suite executives to overcome career-challenging blockages. Earle’s highly successful WIN program has transformed leadership culture and language to stimulate rapid growth for clients, and his crisis-based leadership consulting has produced measurable success in a range of industry sector assignments. Earle's forthcoming Leadership Development programs are non-gendered in their approach or assumptions, and will contribute to the development of more women leaders.

ACADEMIC RESEARCH
Earle is a former Adjunct Professor at IDEAS, SCU, NSW, and is now an Adjunct Professional Fellow at SCU; a Scientific Collaborator, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain; and since 1984 an elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, London. He was awarded a Masters by Research (equivalence), by the School of Management, College of Business, RMIT University, Melbourne, for his development of executive education programs. Earle entered a PhD program by invitation (deferred, with ongoing research) to develop a new theory of leadership based on his extensive experience. His research draws on 40 years of work by Harvard research psychologists into higher adult development to theorise a new field of Postformal Leadership. He has presented his early research findings as an invited plenary speaker at international conferences in Germany and Romania.

MAJOR PROJECT LEADERSHIP
His ground-breaking creation and leadership of Australia’s first Arctic expedition, during 1985-86, was an extraordinarily complex $2.5 million (2022) project. Its operation stretched more than halfway around the world, involved eight countries, British royalty, prominent Australian and UK business, political and social leaders, scientific organisations, and a range of commercial sponsors.

MAJOR EVENT LEADERSHIP
In 1987 Earle was appointed Director of the Tall Ships spectacular where the Prime Minister officially opened Australia’s 1988 Bicentenary. It involved management of 500 volunteers, four city councils, plus State and Federal governments and, with more than 1.5 million visitors, was the biggest staged event in Victoria’s history.

AUTHOR - 'SAVAGE COAST - Inside Australia's First Arctic Expedition'
His acclaimed book, Savage Coast, now in its second fully revised edition, details wide-ranging challenges of field leadership in extreme circumstances. It is held in private collections and libraries worldwide, including the Prince of Wales collection, the Bodleian library in Oxford and the Royal Geographical Society in London. ‘Savage Coast’ is an inspirational record of leadership through failure, success, and constant challenge, providing insights for leaders who know they must prepare themselves to face futures of escalating uncertainty.

AWARDS
The 1,000th Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Trust Award

The rarely-awarded Olegas Truchanas Expedition Canoeing Award



LINKS
Documentary film trailer 'Savage Coast': https://vimeo.com/232723180
Acclaimed book 'Savage Coast': earledeblonville.com


Buy 'Savage Coast': https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B01KQ6PMIW


Leadership thoughts: https://www.linkedin.com/in/earldeblonville/


Leadership videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UU2OGjOLav7PHv5nfYUVk9-g
Personal photography site with expedition images: deblonville.net

CONSULTING
EARLE (at) DEBLONVILLE.COM

Savage Coast is an unrivalled story for our highly uncertain times.

Here is the leader’s inside story of Australia’s 1985-86 historic first Arctic expedition, to an uncharted coast in early winter. It’s an epic of what happens to a $2.5 million voyage to the end of the world where all your plans are blown away by a winter hurricane and all that’s left is slow starvation in a soaked sleeping bag on a wave-battered coastal rock, with no possibility of rescue or of your bodies being discovered, except by hungry polar bears.

Savage Coast offers an almost unrivalled look inside the reality of complex leadership decision-making where almost everything conspires against the expedition’s success, or even its survival. In this story of ongoing crises there are non-stop insights and valuable lessons for those who can expect to be engaged in tomorrow's front-line climate crisis leadership.

Extract from the first edition cover  ---

"A disabled yacht is towed into a remote Arctic village just as winter begins. It has been drifting amongst offshore reefs in freezing sea fog, as giant icebergs cruised past. The engine no longer works, the radio and compass have failed and the sails and rigging are largely worn out. Aboard is a dispirited crew. They have travelled here from the opposite side of the world, now they are trapped, unable to escape the looming freeze by heading south for somewhere warmer. Beneath the surface of the crew’s brittle cohesion, there are tensions waiting to explode and one member has already erupted in uncontrolled violence. As winter’s first hurricane blasts down from the 10,000-foot high icecap and through the village at 240kph, the die is cast for a journey none of them could have imagined."

Vox Pops

"Timeless insights into the hidden depths of leadership”
-Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Bt, OBE, FRGS, world’s greatest living explorer

“Fully captures the reality of leadership.”
- Dr Iain McCormack, Polar Psychologist

“Deep insights into complexity and unpredictability.”
- Sir Gustav Nossal, Emeritus Professor, University of Melbourne

“A masterpiece of exploration by a poet of action” 

- Bill Green, Author and Screenwriter: ‘Terminator 2’.

“An unvarnished record of a major achievement”

- Professor Barry Jones. Australian Minister for Science 1983-90

“A fascinating exploration of an explorer”
- Phillip Adams. International Broadcaster

“Its frankness in describing success and failure sets it apart from leadership books.”
- Jonathan Hutchings, Company Managing Director

“Reveals that leadership cannot be taught, no leader is infallible and there is no single recipe for success.”
- Richard Gilmore, Executive Director: EarthWatch Trust

Selected Reviews

“This book is a powerful account of an expedition that Earle de Blonville led to East Greenland in 1985-86. This is a powerful story of privation, courage, obstinacy and tenacity, full of sharp insights, vividly written, an unvarnished record of a major achievement. The story, with its freshness and immediacy, is timeless, demonstrating what charismatic leadership can achieve, against all odds.”

“This is a brilliant, beautifully written testimony to the resilience of the human spirit. The book tells Earle de Blonville’s own story as the leader of Australia’s first expedition to the Arctic in 1985-86. It illustrates the power of one man’s vision and the courage of the author and his men to rise above extreme adversity to carry it out. It offers rare glimpses into the extraordinary weight of responsibility he shouldered. This book should appeal to anyone seeking to chart a course for themselves or their organization in the rapidly changing uncharted landscape and uncertain futures of our fragile planet.”

“How Earle and his hard-bitten team survive their battle with the elements is nothing short of a miracle. Earle is a fine lyrical writer with enchanting passages on the subtlety and spirituality of polar seascapes. Importantly, he is brutally honest with descriptions of the rawness of basic living in makeshift camps ashore and with the agony of personality clashes. Every nautical mile of this journey is hard-won. For Earle, there could be no turning back.”