ABOUT BEAR
Bear Leadership helps you develop your innate human leadership qualities that Mankind has been evolving for millennia.

These qualities, identified by Harvard research psychologists, include intuition, creativity, paradox, complexity and higher purpose, and are the hallmarks of wisdom and mature adult development. They are the secret to preparing for leadership's unpredictable challenges.

Leadership has been part of Mankind's DNA for at least a million years, from when our forebears first built sea-going boats for dangerous migration voyages. Real leadership is how we have survived, explored and evolved to reach this era. Field Leadership refers to real world action responses to the kinds of unexpected circumstances that have always challenged Mankind.

Now, the escalating global impacts of climate crisis will increasingly need great leadership, everywhere, as Mankind adapts to major disruption and even raw survival at all levels of business, government, and society. Sea level rise can close down a whole city in hours, fires can destroy life for millions in days, floods can starve a region in a week: these can impact anyone, anywhere, any time.

Bear Leadership's advisory intelligence is drawn from long, personal, lived leadership experience in key facets of the vast world of Field Leadership, far from the ivory tower of academic theories and 'styles' of Business School managerialism.

Bear's mantra: "Leadership is neither born nor taught, but circumstance calling forth a champion."
EXPEDITION LEVEL
Bear's EXPEDITION LEVEL Leadership Development services are shaped by direct Expedition field experience, plus deep research into epic and well documented, adventure, exploration and historical leadership case studies. Expeditions offer the most profound insights into the realities of leadership.

Firstly, understanding how Expeditions, by their democracy of shared challenge, produce cooperative, constructive and mutually beneficial behaviours that bring out the best in people through social cohesion and creation of shared futures while under physical, emotional and psychological stress. This contrasts with the competitive, ego-driven business environment that uses fear and isolation to stimulate aggression, exclusion and selfish ambition.

Secondly, long before the 1980s business school conflation of Leadership and Managerialism began, Expeditions have always been valuable laboratories for understanding how humans deal with situations consistent with the struggles of our ancient forebears that shaped us as humans today.

Thirdly, over 40 years, the global 'Leadership Industry'- led by academics - has created at least 40 theories of leadership, 1,500 definitions of leadership and published millions of books on leadership. Today, 'leadership' has become a generic term used by everyone, everywhere, and has arguably lost most of its meaning.

Lastly, Expeditions offer us insights into how we can face challenges together and build more sustainable societies.
ALL IN TOGETHER
Bear Leadership's programs are gender-neutral because Field Leadership itself is gender-neutral.

Our programs are equally suited for men and women, because Leadership is Leadership, any which way that circumstance calls you into action, no matter your age, education, profession or physical ability. Your individuality is your secret sauce.

Expeditions do not discriminate on gender. Same environment, same physical and human challenges, same pain, same exhilaration. Male and female burn the equivalent energy climbing a mountain. Sub-zero water saps the same heat from you, man or woman. The same human spirit is called to serve.

History teaches us that women explorers are just as tough, visionary, and resourceful as men, and often bring more insight, maturity and self-control. In many famous cases women have proven to be better survivors than men.

Gender is irrelevant. Leadership calls on the same human intelligence, empathy, courage, determination, creativity, collaboration, humility and love for your fellows.

The key reality is that we are all in this world together, all facing the same global challenges which all call for great Leadership.

EXECUTIVE TRANSITION COACHING

Meeting Personal Career Challenges

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PERSONAL LEADERSHIP JOURNEY

Advanced Leadership Development Program

CORPORATE IN-RESIDENCE ADVISORY

Full Leadership Service Suite

EARLE DE BLONVILLE, FRGS
Explorer, Author, Educator, C-Suite Coach, Academic Researcher, Corporate Leadership Consultant.
My aim is to share with you insights on leadership that I have gained in wild and dangerous places, to inspire you to reach beyond your imagined limits and seek your own leadership understandings through your own unique experiences.
HOLLYWOOD
Today's global 'Leadership Industry', worth a staggering $360 billion, results from 50 years of Business School academics repackaging Management as Leadership. Today it seems every ambitious employee wants to be seen as a 'Leader'.

Such is the trickle-down effect from the 1980s when Managers were ego-stroked by popular media anointing them as 'Leaders'. Sadly, in the employment sphere, 'Leader' is just a social conceit. And B-Schools have creamed a fabulous payload selling this faux status.

One of the great leadership realists, a Harvard professor, laments that teaching leadership has not advanced humanity one jot, leaders worldwide have never been held in such low repute and we still don't know how to produce good leaders.

Reason? Business Schools, in a stroke of marketing genius, invoked the Hollywood star system, conferring the honorific 'Leader' onto individuals, when in truth there are no leaders as such, there is only Leadership. When circumstances hit us unexpectedly, the reality is not Hollywood's star actor, alone, vanquishing the overwhelming threat. Instead, everyone is in it together, doing their best, learning as they go, committed to each other. The so-called leader is often not even visible, because the team acts as one unit, a committed mix of interdependent talent. If one quality shines, it's humility.

Drew Hansen, Leadership Contributor, Forbes, after extensivve research says: "Leaders are created in the crucible of life, not in the classroom."
SAVAGE COAST
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 global front-line climate crisis leadership.

Here is the leader’s true 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 when all your plans are blown away by a winter hurricane and all that’s left is slow starvation in a frozen sleeping bag on a wave-battered coastal rock, with no possibility of rescue , or of your bodies ever being discovered, except by hungry polar bears.

Reviews -
"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 Leadership Psychologist

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

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