Patrick J. Murphy and Ray W. Coye’s  Mutiny and Its  Bounty: Leadership Lessons from the Age of Discovery explores how great seafaring captains like Columbus and Magellan not only quelled mutinies but also built upon such incidents to strengthen their enterprises. Today’s organizational leaders have much to learn about leadership and tactics from these earlier masters. Learn more and read a short excerpt from the book below.

A few leadership qualities of the mysterious Sebastian Cabot:

• Guileful. Able to influence others interpersonally but not when dealing with groups.
• Incredible ability to mislead of those in power in order to achieve his aspirations.
• Complex leadership style, often generated positive and negative outcomes simultaneously.
• Despite low seafaring expertise, huge effect on English seafaring just prior to England’s golden age.

Patrick J. Murphy and Ray W. Coye—

English seafaring might have developed differently without the mercurial Cabots. The elder, John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto), had much in common with Christopher Columbus (Christoforo Colombo) and was similarly inspired by Marco Polo. Cabot’s birthplace is unclear, but he became a Venetian citizen (Zuan Chabotto) in the mid-1470s. From Venice, he visited Mecca disguised as a Muslim to research spice caravans. By the late 1480s, debt-laden from failed construction projects, Cabot fled to Spain. There he claimed exeprtise in construction on water (learned in Venice). In the early 1490s, he proposed harbor redesigns in Valencia nad a stone bridge across the Guadalquivir River in Seville to repalce a 700-year -old floating one. In 1494, the bridge project’s funding was withdrawn. Cabot then went to England, where he sensed quickly that the English wanted from him what Columbus had done for Spain.

…

It is not exactly clear when or where Sebastian Cabot was born (circa 1475, probably in Venice) or when he died. What is clear is that he was a strategic, passionate explorer with a worldly, entrepreneurial spirit. His character reflected the intensity of Magellan and the cleverness of Columbus. He often acted with multiple intentions that seemed conflicting but would prove congruent. His actions could be mysterious, and he had an uncanny and unerring capacity for achieving simultaneously positive and negative results. Cabot was a master at turning utter failures into successes. He was also a rebel. For example, Cabot turned south during his 1508 trip to the northwest Atlantic and traced the North American coast almost all the way to Florida–a sidetrip beyond the scope of his contract. He did not stop until mutiny compelled him to head back to England.

When Cabot returned to England from his Florida excursion, it was early 1509, and a new king, Henry VIII, was on the throne. Cabot’s venture had generated nothing other than a rough survey of the American coastline that offered no new information. He lost some credibility as a navigator, but his carefully engineered reputation for world-class cartography skills won him a royal commission to make maps and charts. This career move took him away from his more entrepreneurial aspirations as a navigator. A map he made in May 1512 guided the English army to Spain as part of a campaign against Aquitaine in southern France. Cabot joined that expedition secretly hoping to find Spanish employment as a seafarer in a culture that valued discovery and exploration more strongly.

When the English army mutinied and the whole expedition dissolved, Cabot snatched his opportunity. A few months later, he secured a meeting with the secretary of the Spanish princess Juana Loca (Joanna the Mad) at Burgos, which was instrumental in gaining an audience with her father, Ferdinand II of Aragon. Many people in Spain had heard of Cabot’s father, and he freely used his father’s name when it helped his cause. Moreover, Ferdinand’s other daughter, Catherine of Aragon, had recently become Henry VIII’s first queen. Henry eventually banished her and married Anne Boleyn, but at this early point Ferdinand welcomed this “Englishman” who had served his admirable English son-in-law. Cabot’s clever presentation of ability and knowledge was met with favor.

Excerpted from Mutiny and Its Bounty: Leadership Lessons from the Age of Discovery. Copyright © 2013 by Patrick J. Murphy and Ray W. Coye. All rights reserved.

A full list of participating institutions and what they’re offering tomorrow can be viewed here.

If you can make it to the Yale University Art Gallery or Yale Center for British Art tomorrow, we’ll see you there!

In The Value of Species, Edward L. McCord both celebrates the immense breadth of life forms found on earth—from the rainforests and oceans to the prairies and deserts—and defends its value in the face of ever-more-urgent environment threats to biodiversity. Drawing on concepts from philosophy, law, and ethics in addition to biology, McCord argues that species are not valuable only insofar as they are useful to humans as food, companionship, or entertainment. Rather, he writes, they are of great intellectual import, for their fascinating individual features and distinct place in ecosystems and evolution have a great deal to teach us about life in the broadest sense.

Edward L. McCord—

We live on a planet defined by geographic features, and the life of the planet everywhere reflects the history of its surface.  We understand much of this, such as the broad division of life forms marked by Wallace’s Line separating ancient Asia from Australasia.  But there are also countless matters we do not understand.  As a fan of carnivorous plants, I wonder how the famous Venus Flytrap came to live in only a small Atlantic coastal region near Wilmington, North Carolina, USA, or how the captivating pitcher plant Cephalotus follicularis came to live in only a small coastal region near Albany, Australia.

Every creature small and large is partly a story of this planet, and that is something wonderful about them.  Consider a lucid example.  The fastest land mammal in the Western Hemisphere is the elegant Antilocapra Americana, or “pronghorn,” as it is commonly known, a native of the American West where I run field courses.  The pronghorn is often confused with the Old World “antelope,” but the two animals evolved on separate continents over tens of millions of years and are virtually unrelated.  The speed of the pronghorn is a striking story to awaken why we should appreciate every species on earth.  Yet the pronghorn also is a cautionary exhibit to understand how, to our diminishment, we can fail to spot this.

Consider two kinds of facts about the pronghorn.  On the one hand are the details we gain from observing the pronghorn, asking questions, and learning about it.  What is “the pronghorn”?  Among a myriad of features that we discover, we learn about its extraordinary swiftness.  The pronghorn can sprint at sixty miles per hour.  Imagine that!  Only African cheetahs attain a faster pace, but even those modern cheetahs cannot sustain high speeds as long as a pronghorn can.  The pronghorn can run at a very high velocity over many miles.

The singular design of the pronghorn serves this amazing speed, with a huge heart, windpipe, and lungs, a large liver for quick glycogen, and special cartilage padding on its hooves.  But then, we learn that this animal does not need that exceptional design.  No predator within its range is remotely so fast.  Thus, as we learn more, another question looms:  Why is the pronghorn so fast?

We now know that this answer will take us to Darwin-Wallace evolution theory and open up for us profound dimensions of creation that the pronghorn shares with all life on earth.  The pronghorn that we see is not just a physical thing before us, but a stage in a process preceded by its parents, their parents, and on and on, in an uninterrupted lineage over eternities of selection of adaptive traits.  And we know from the fossil record that the pronghorn shared its broad open landscapes with several species of high-speed cats that disappeared about 11,000 years ago.   That is why it is so fast.

When we ask questions and learn what the “pronghorn” actually is, we see that it is an artifact of the earth’s history still in play, and it represents within its form at every level of detail the working of ages of the earth that have come and gone.

It would be less poignant, yet make no difference to the story, if those American fast cats were still around; they would still be responsible for the pronghorn’s quickness (and the pronghorn for theirs).  Further, the pronghorn in these reflections is just like every form of life–every fish, beetle, mammal, and tree.  Every living thing is the forward point in a flame of life that has remained aglow through billions of years of impacts in the earth’s career.  And since the career of the earth is unique, every species on earth is unique in the universe.  We will come to appreciate all living species if we just come to realize and appreciate the infinitely astonishing dimensionality exclusive to each.

Let us now consider another kind of information about the pronghorn.  They are beautiful; they are entertaining to hunt; they taste good.   From these facts there follow economic and social returns that relate to a different set of values that we find in the pronghorn.  Such values will not be shared by most other living things, and yet many people never see beyond them.  Many people never inquire what the pronghorn, or any other form of life, actually is.

It is striking that public arguments for the value of species cling so closely to instrumental values—values for human health, safety, survival, and play—at the expense of the profound alternatives.  For it is clear that instrumental values are not the reason that many scholars and scientists and members of the public care about species.

We do not find them in Edward O. Wilson’s encomium to a naturalist’s education:

“Why do I tell you this little boy’s story of medusas, rays, and sea monsters, nearly sixty years after the fact?  Because it illustrates, I think, how a naturalist is created.  A child comes to the edge of deep water with a mind prepared for wonder.”

We do not find them when scientist Cheryl Hayashi, in her vibrant TEDTalk, distills for us her attraction to spider silk:

“In addition to these biomimetic applications of spider silks, personally, I find studying spider silks just fascinating in and of itself.  I love when I’m in the laboratory a new spider silk sequence comes in.  That’s just the best.  (Laughter)  It’s like the spiders are sharing an ancient secret with me, and that’s why I’m going to spend the rest of my life studying spider silk.”

These emotional reactions that are aroused by an intellectual appreciation of species broach the ineffable.  As Charles Darwin wrote of a verdant wood, “It is easy to specify the individual objects of admiration in these grand scenes; but it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, astonishment, and devotion, which fill and elevate the mind.”

Such feelings are charged when we stop to consider the infinitely complex invention any species represents.  These are feelings inexpressible, yet immeasurably profound in a human life.  Their inexpressibility is a challenge for advocacy to protect the living heritage of the earth and our spiritual connection to the marvels of living creation.

What could be a more meaningful value of species than one inspired in our emotions when we learn the amazing artifact of creation a species actually is?

Our landscape of values is large and competitive.  We are ever measuring the value of species against property rights, jobs, wealth, gains today versus gains in the future, and so on.  It all appears so complicated.

Still, it is possible to look at all these strains of human agency at the same time and make a clear and rational decision about the value of species.  It is possible to raise above the rest the distinguishing human value in learning, and properly appreciate by our choices the power of human consciousness for reflective appreciation of existence.

Edward L. McCord is director of programming and special projects, University Honors College, University of Pittsburgh. He also is director of the university’s Yellowstone Field Course and the Allen L. Cook Spring Creek Preserve near Laramie, Wyoming.

Patrick J. Murphy and Ray W. Coye’s Mutiny and Its  Bounty: Leadership Lessons from the Age of Discovery explores how great seafaring captains like Columbus and Magellan not only quelled mutinies but also built upon such incidents to strengthen their enterprises. Today’s organizational leaders have much to learn about leadership and tactics from these earlier masters. Learn more and read a short excerpt from the book below.

A few leadership qualities of the great Ferdinand Magellan:

• Fierce, task-oriented leader. Quelled mutiny violently.
• Driven to the extent that he left his homeland in disgrace to chase his purpose.
• A poor communicator but one of the world’s expert at his job.
• Willing to give it all for his purpose. More so than other leaders.

Patrick J. Murphy and Ray W. Coye—

As a commander, Magellan adopted the bold style favored in Portuguese seafaring culture: his fearlessness and focus were unrelenting. His leadership was different from Columbus’s, although both had immense talent. Columbus was a warm consensus builder, but he was not weak. Magellan was dictatorial but not unjust. He led by actions rather than words and, as a leader, responded boldly and intelligently when a mutiny was fierce and organized.

…

Magellan’s problems with his members were related in part to the challenges of leading men of various cultural backgrounds. Portuguese wondered why he had really left Portugal. Castilians did not fully accept him becasue he was Portuguese. Everyone welcomed his knowledge, and no on e distrusted his competence, but few trusted his values. Magellan knew that his expertise was not sufficient to establish his authority in case of uncertain circumstances. He needed to connect with members. One of the best primary sources on the distrust that Magellan faced is the account by an Italian named Anthoyne Pigaphete, or, in modern English, Antony Pigafetta. His job was to write a firsthand chronicle of Magellan’s voyage. To him, the gap between leader and members was apparent. Pigafetta writes:

The masters and captains of the others ships of his company did not love him: of this I do not know the reason, except by cause of his, the captain-general, being Portuguese, and they were Spaniards or Castilians, who for a long time have been in rivalry and ill will with one another.

Magellan did not, like Columbus, create misleading logbooks. He instead declared a less ambitious version of his goal before leaving Seville so as not to dishearten potential members. At sea, one of his first acts was to establish a command system for the ships of his armada based on lantern signals. His orders were conveyed from the stern of his ship (the Trinidad) three times a day in coordination with the standard Castilian three-part watch schedule. The expectation was that the leaders of the other ships would follow and ask no questions. During this part of the journey Magellan did not entertain communications in response to his signaled orders unless it was absolutely necessary to do so.

Excerpted from Mutiny and Its Bounty: Leadership Lessons from the Age of Discovery. Copyright © 2013 by Patrick J. Murphy and Ray W. Coye. All rights reserved.

Photo: Courtesy of the Emily Rauh Pulitzer Archive

For the May 13 centennial of Joseph Pulitzer Jr.’s birth, Marjorie B. Cohn, author of Classic Modern, the first biography of Joseph Pulitzer, Jr. to focus on his art collecting—arguably his greatest passion—and his role in bringing modernism to the American Midwest, writes here about one of the pleasures of writing the biography of a man whose life ended only twenty years before: interviews with his friends.

Marjorie B. Cohn—

The widow of Joseph Pulitzer Jr. (1913-1993), Emily Rauh Pulitzer, who had been my friend for many years before her marriage, knew of my scholarly interest in the history of collecting, and so after Joe’s death she asked me to write his cultural biography.  Eventually I agreed, she took the pledge not to be a “torch-bearing widow” – that is, to offer me her cooperation and no interference – and we began a partnership in the endeavor.  One of Emmy’s first essential acts: she prepared a list of persons I should interview, beginning with his oldest surviving friends.  As I learned more about Joe, I formed my own list of other interviewees who were only his acquaintances or perhaps even not that, just other actors on the same stages on which he had moved through a long life with multiple roles in art culture.

But this reminiscence is about those interviews with friends.  I immediately went to visit the very oldest – a few men and many women – some so frail they were already housebound.  I decided, given their age, that I should take handwritten notes.  A tape recorder or laptop would be obtrusive, even intimidating to many, especially, I realized, to several women from the same social caste into which Joe had been born, more than ninety years before.  A machine would have lacked gentility, it would have suggested somehow that their words could appear on a witness stand.  Yet the memories of two of these women provided essential, unimpeachable testimony.

Joe was a handsome man, elegant and attentive to women with whom he had been a friend.  It seemed – and several of them admitted as much to me – that they had all been a little in love with him, although their romantic lives had taken other paths.  And so they were all delighted to reminisce about what had been a wholly positive association, perhaps among the most glamorous of their entire lives.  Each of them had long and detailed impressions and experiences to relate, often with exact dialogue of the conversations of a half-century and more before.

After his return from college, Joe lived in a room above the garage in his parents’ house.  One of my interviewees, in her nineties and living in a St. Louis retirement home, remembered he had given a party there, which must have occurred after October 1936, because Joe had already acquired his great “Negro Period” Picasso, Woman in Yellow.  He had hung it in his room, and she remembered sitting on his bed and asking him, “How can you wake up in the morning and see a woman as ugly as that!”  Later she thought he should have dismissed her with “You silly woman…” but instead he replied, “Some day you’ll understand.”

Photo: Courtesy of the Emily Rauh Pulitzer Archive

The other interviewee was an equally elderly woman living near Chicago who in the early 1940s was studying with the conservative regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton.  Joe, who was at that time married and living in a house of his own, had brought home from the Nazi “degenerate art” auction of 1939 Matisse’s Bathers with a Turtle, which was filled with evidence of the artist’s starts and stops in the course of execution of this great early modernist canvas.  “Why,” she asked Joe, “did he show such a struggle he had in painting it?”  This was not the technique that she was being taught.  “Some day,” Joe replied, “you’ll understand.”

Neither woman knew the other’s report of their conversations.  I was so lucky to have caught their enduring memories, to learn verbatim not only about my biographical subject’s precocious understanding of the European breakthrough to painterly abstraction, but also his patience, unlikely in so young an advocate for the modern, with St. Louis contemporaries whose artistic sensibility differed from his own.

Marjorie B. Cohn is Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints, Emerita, at the Harvard Art Museums.

In credo of “life, liberty, and the pursuit  of happiness,” there seems an implicit acknowledgement of ambition–should one’s desires take you so far. This picture in American life is particularly central to our own understanding of national history and culture.  Here, we present a Q&A with William Casey King, author of Ambition, A History: From Vice to Virtue, whose previous work  as a Salomon Brothers bond trader interestingly informed his work as an historian of this significant human concept.  He considers why our cultural  perceptions of ambition have changed over the generations or even how they can change over the course of a lifetime. From ambition’s relationship with extremism to its ambiguity and alternating celebration and demise, King‘s analysis suggests that even in the twenty-first century, ambition has never fully lost its ties to vice and continues to exhibit a dual nature, positive or negative depending upon the ends, the means, and the individual involved.

Yale University Press: How did you first become interested in the topic of ambition?

William Casey King

William Casey King: Working on Wall Street in the 1980s it was hard not to think about ambition. I was in the Sales and Trading Program at Salomon Brothers, made famous (or rather infamous) in Michael Lewis’ first book Liar’s Poker. If ambition is a beast, Solly in the 80’s was the belly.   It’s interesting because the character of Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s movie Wall Street, set in the 1980s, talked about greed. His famous speech from the movie was “greed is good,” which talked about how greed drives American production and innovation. But I think they got it wrong. As someone who knows that world and the people in it, it’s really not about greed—most are not driven by love of money. On Wall Street, money is ambition’s scoreboard.  But it’s not just Wall Street.  Scoreboards are all around us. Our achievements are continually quantified by titles, prizes, promotions, evaluations, batting averages, bylines.  When I was Wall Street, I never imagined that I might someday write a book about ambition, though I knew my ambition lay elsewhere.

YUP: While America often is viewed as a nation with ambition as one of its defining values, in fact it had a strong cultural history well before the United States.  What were some of the earliest records of ambition, and from where do they originate? How did they make the jump from Europe to America? 

WCK: Ambition is as old as human history. It is easy to look back and see evidence of it whenever people express the desire to do the impossible, to become people who defy the expectations of birth, to conquer worlds like Alexander, to rise from obscurity to greatness of fame, to design machines, like Leonardo or the Wright Brothers so that man could fly like the birds, to know the mysteries of the universe like Galileo, to find a new sea route to India like Columbus, to conquer a city of gold like Cortez, to fly to the moon, and beyond. But ambition as we know it was also often seen as threatening to people in power. It threatened authority. It upset the apple cart. So for centuries it was defined as something bad, something that you should carefully hide, or not have at all. As a matter of fact, if you look at St. Augustine and St. Gregory’s definition of the seven deadly sins, the way they define “avarice” would include what we would call “ambition.” So, in a way, ambition should be included among the deadly sins. And when the first English colonists come to America, this negative attitude is carried with them. It is described in the Puritan texts as a “canker on the soul,” a “moth of holiness.” Satan is the sort of poster child for ambition. So, clearly, not a good thing. The amazing thing is the turn-around that my book describes. How did this awful thing become this American thing?

YUP: You tackle ambition’s ugly side, via the topic of race subjection in the Age of Exploration. This was experienced most keenly, you argue, by Native Americans and African Americans.  In your research, how did you find oppression and ambition interrelated? Is it your view that it is possible to have a more refined version of ambition where it can exist without oppression?  

WCK: Ambition is a relative concept. To be excellent or “better” is most often defined in terms of better than others, compared to another individual or group. Think about it: if everyone is excellent, then excellence is normal, and no one is excellent if everyone is excellent. You really see this when the Spanish first encounter the Native Americans— they are not sure what to make of them. Initially, they had a debate in Valladolid, a city in Spain, to decide exactly what sort of human beings these people were, whether they were born to be slaves of the Spanish, or citizens, barbarians, or should they just be considered individuals in a permanent state of childhood. . But there is no debate that they are imagined to be inferior.  The same holds true for Africans, women or Jews in Nazi Germany. 

This is ambition’s dark side and at the root of racism and extremism.  Better is often imagined in these relative terms, at the expense of a degraded other, and ambition can be quite awful. If we want to get rid of racism in America, do we have to outlaw ambition?  Obviously that’s not happening. But if we can reimagine ambition as the credo of self-improvement, as measured by internal standards, rather than relative ones, maybe it’s possible. It’s hard to imagine.

YUP: Benjamin Franklin is often cited as the epitome of American ambition. His well-known aphorism “Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” actually was penned letter in his career and in his earlier years he felt ambition was distasteful. How did his changing opinion on ambition come to pass? And is this transition suggestive of America’s shifting attitude to ambition as well?  

WCK: I remember when I was doing my research and I found this quote in a commonplace book, a diary people used to keep where they would write their favorite quotes or poems.  The date on the book was 1670, 40 years before Franklin’s birth!

This isn’t to bash Franklin. He never claimed that what he wrote was original. But somewhere in our history we started creating these origin myths, and part of origin is originality. So we came to see Franklin and his aphorisms and America as if it had sprung from the earth without antecedent.  Part of all this is imagining Ben Franklin as the poster-child for American ambition.  His rise from printer’s apprentice to founding father, his success and fame that he won through hard work and temperance was held as a model for American ambition. That’s why I was shocked that in his first will and testament in 1755 Franklin thanks God for freeing him from ambition. I remember thinking why would he say that? Mister ambition doesn’t think he’s ambitious?!  Why wouldn’t he want to be thought of that way? I guess this was my first clue that this book about ambition needed to start well before Franklin.  As for “do attitudes towards ambition change during Franklin’s life?” Absolutely. And it’s the American Revolution where you see old attitudes toward ambition most seriously challenged.

YUP: You point out that Thomas Jefferson revised the opening line of the Declaration of Independence, in order to avoid having it be seen as a “declaration of ambition.” What was the change in the prose, from what to what? What does this say about the founding father’s view of ambition? Does this revised first line suggest a potential change in how we should view the document’s intended mission?  

WCK: Pulitzer-prize winning historians have studied the evolution of Declaration of Independence, from Jefferson’s original rough draft to the document we know.  Most argue that Jefferson changed his original because the revised draft sounded better. It changes from, “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a people to advance from that subordination in which they have hitherto remained, and to assume among the powers of the earth the equal and independent station,” to “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station…” In Jefferson’s original rough draft  he talks not about separation, but advancing from subordination to an equal and independent station. Advancing, rising up to a certain station, having a higher station than god wants us to,  is one of the ways ambition would have been defined in the eighteenth century. And ambition, in the eighteenth century, at the time of the Revolution, was still a dirty word, with deep ties in Anglo-American culture to sin.

If you called someone ambitious in the eighteenth century, it would be like calling someone a communist in the 50s, or a racist today. It is not something that you wanted to have hung on you.  So when Jefferson either intentionally or unintentionally says in the original rough draft, it’s time for us to proclaim our ambition, for us to advance to an equal station, he shows it to Adams and Franklin and the change is made.  It’s an easy thing to miss unless you spend 6 years thinking about ambition and tracing it through centuries. But once I had, I was better able to approach even the Declaration, American Scripture, with a fresh eye and a better understanding of the culture that shaped it.

YUP: What is America’s current view on ambition? Is it seen as admirable or as a more ambiguous value?   

WCK: I think that the ambiguity still remains. It is seen as good or bad depending on who is expressing it and to what ends. For example, an ambitious woman is viewed in different terms than an ambitious man. We expect politicians to be ambitious, students should be, and art, music, film definitely. But I recently did an analysis of 30 years of New York Times data and what I found is that when we falter, we things aren’t going well for America, we tend to question ambition to a much greater extent. It’s natural. Like people whenever we have a bad spell, or things don’t seem to be working out the way we imagined they would, we turn inward and question ourselves. The, “if only I had been different,” introspective self-flagellation. So when things are going well, we tend to celebrate all that made us American, like ambition. But when things are going not as well, when the economy falters, we doubt even the most fundamental aspects of who we are as a nation and people.

William Casey King is executive director of the Yale Center for Analytical Sciences, Yale University. He was previously a Salomon Brothers bond trader and executive director of the W. E. B. DuBois Institute of African and African American Research, Harvard University. He lives in Hamden, CT.  Ambition, A History: From Vice to Virtue is available now from Yale University Press. 

Patrick J. Murphy and Ray W. Coye’s   Mutiny and Its  Bounty: Leadership Lessons from the Age of Discovery explores how great seafaring captains like Columbus and Magellan not only quelled mutinies but also built upon such incidents to strengthen their enterprises. Today’s organizational leaders have much to learn about leadership and tactics from these earlier masters. Learn more and read a short excerpt from the book below.

A few leadership qualities of the great Christopher Columbus:

• Copious note taker
• Able to reinvent himself (in Italy, Portugal, Spain)
• Used mutiny to help his first enterprise
• Had an incredible ability to communicate and to motivate others

Patrick J. Murphy and Ray W. Coye—

Compared to other seafarers, Columbus was an uncommonly dedicated journal keeper and strategic planner. His seafaring prowess was based on what he learned from the Portuguese and from counting and recording every single thing he could observe and research. He viewed the Italian explorer Marco Polo with cultural pride. Columbus’s own copy of Polo’s writings is filled with his critical marginalia. For his proposed venture to the west, Columbus had “determined to keep an account of the voyage, and to write down punctually everything we perform or say from day to day.” He promised Queen Isabella that he would “draw up a nautical chart, which shall contain the several parts of the land in their proper situations; and also to compose a book to represent the whole by pictures, with latitudes and longitudes, on which all accounts it behooves me to abstain from sleep and make many efforts in navigation, which things will demand much labor.” As a manager, his style was based on evidence and hard work. As a leader he relied on the transformational effect of his ability to persuade others, as we shall see.

…

Mutinies were so natural in the Age of Discovery that they could be reliably expected to occur in just about any bold seafaring enterprise. They were a normal part of taking risks together in organized but uncertain settings. Leaders and members abided by an authority structure, but proximity during an enterprise made for a certain sense of equality. All leaders directly experienced mutiny. Great leaders knew how to respond effectively to mutiny, often through means so artful as to transform it into success. Because mutiny is a force, it ought to be possible ot leverage it in creative ways to serve a human enterprise. The culture of the Age of Discovery, especially in its early years, admitted these kinds of possibilities.

…

Columbus’s first enterprise is an excellent illustration of how a leader can respond to subtle and underlying tension when it flashes into mutinous action. In fact, he incurred at least two mutinies during his first and most famous venture to the New World.

The boldness of Columbus’s venture raised the bar for all other seafarers. At age forty, he led an enterprise comprising three ships and 120 members. The ship sailed past Palos and into the ocean on August 3, 1492. But months before the departure, the atmosphere around the enterprise had been uncomfortable. Columbus noted that the crew grumbled from the start about the long distance ahead and the uncertainty. Three days after leaving port, crew on the Pinta, reluctant to keep sailing away from familiar territory, sabotaged its rudder. Columbus was unflappable in response to such incidents. The Pinta‘s rudder was repaired at the Canary Islands as it was refitted with square sails. Such bothersome matters as sabotage stemmed in part from the royal decree given to Columbus. It prohibited Portuguese from joining the enterprise and authorized exoneration of crimes for those Castilians who did join. The latter allowance ensured the requisite number for an enterprise that “should not proceed by land to the east, as is customary, but by a westerly route.” It also attracted criminals while repelling good sailors, and it discouraged ship owners from lending their vessels to the ambitious project of a clever foreigner who had become known in Palos as a madman and a maniac. Yet sabotage, problems with crew membership, and unflattering perceptions of his character had no chance of breaking Columbus’s spirit. To the contrary they reinforced it.

Excerpted from Mutiny and Its Bounty: Leadership Lessons from the Age of Discovery. Copyright © 2013 by Patrick J. Murphy and Ray W. Coye. All rights reserved.

Capital Affairs is a cultural history set in London which describes a city’s shifting relationship to sex in the public sphere. Mort’s story begins with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. Against the backdrop of the glittering carriage carrying the queen passing through the street were murmurings of “vice” bubbling up in the city. The coronation and the “seedy underbelly” of London’s pleasure district were not far removed from one another. Kinsey was not the only who “noted the worrying proximity of monarchy and high society to the West End’s dubious sexual playgrounds.” It is this tension between public and private, high and “low” culture that comes to the forefront in Mort’s account, where the cultural influence over sex and permissiveness travels in both directions.

Mort focuses on the rising public presence and legal “reform” of homosexuality and prostitution, yet these issues stand in for broader cultural shifts in London (and Britain at large). Rather than being a story of a liberal/conservative dispute, or a post-war optimistic acceptance of permissiveness, a richer and more dynamic picture emerges of the London metropolis, a place Benjamin Disraeli called “a modern Babylon” a century earlier. The author also puts the public debates in context, drawing the connection between the mores and anxieties in the ‘50s and ‘60s to Victorian narratives like those surrounding Jack the Ripper. The same themes of insatiable monstrousness, of social pathology, appear in the language around John Christie’s murders.

The Profumo scandal of 1963 is a key moment for Mort, as it stirred up competing truths about sex, power, and urban London. It began with Stephen Ward, an osteopath connected to both the aristocracy and the “underworld,” introducing the married British Secretary of State John Profumo to 19-year-old dancer Catherine Keeler. Keeler was coincidentally also having an affair with Yevgeni Ivanov, a Russian attaché involved in espionage, who was also at the party; the scandal grew increasingly complex and public. While the Profumo affair “erupted into public consciousness in the spring of 1963, its roots lay further back, in the activities of the men and women whose lives were part of elite London society during the 1950s.” The elite are then confronted by figures like the lower-class Catherine Keeler come forward, publicizing their role in the scandal with ease. In her story several threads of societal anxiety weave together: fears over the Cold War, drugs, class mobility and of course, sexual permissiveness.

In 1966, American journalist Piri Halasz wrote a cover story for Time magazine that painted of picture of London as the centre of the “swinging sixties.” The tone assumed that slow triumph of progressiveness over sexual mores where “if Britain had lost an empire, it had ‘recovered a lightness of heart lost during the weight centuries of world leadership.’” Yet in Capital Affairs we see sex as a more complex site of political power moves, class struggle, and “shot through with the divisions that marked contemporary England.”

May 21, 2013 Update: Thanks to all our stylish entrants on our Pinterest Shoe Obsession contest! We’ve selected a design by Svenja Ritter, uploaded by Crisia M of Australia, as the contest winner.  Be sure to follow us on Pinterest for more pins and peeks inside the exquisitely produced yaleARTbooks list!

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The moment has finally arrived—YUP is now on Pinterest! Yes, we know it took us a while but we here now and can’t wait to share all the fantastic books and artwork that we are up to our elbows in over here at the office! To inaugurate our presence on Pinterest, we are holding a contest for our readers.

In association with the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, Yale University Press has just published Shoe Obsession, a lavishly illustrated exploration of the most extravagant shoes designed of the 21^st century. Co-written by Valerie Steele and Colleen Hill, two the world’s leading historians of fashion, the book features 150 pairs of some the most quirky, extreme and delectable shoes produced  in the last twelve years by prominent designers including Manolo Blahnik, Pierre Hardy, Christian Louboutin, and Bruno Frisoni.

Inspired by the sky-high heels, thigh-high lace up boots, and the extraordinary women who wear them, YUP is inviting readers to pin a photograph of the strangest, most extreme pair of shoes you own! Whether they be red-hot heels, avant-garde booties, puppy dog slippers, or summer espadrilles, we want to see what magical shoe confections are hidden away in your closet! The person with the most outrageous pair of shoes will win a free copy of Show Obsession.

Please follow and post your photos on the Shoe Obsession: The Contest board on the Yalepress Pinterest page. The contest will run through Friday, May 17 and we will announce the winner on Tuesday, May 21!

Shoe Obsession was written and edited by Valerie Steele, the director and chief curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York and Colleen Hill, the associate curator of accessories at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York. Shoe Obsession is published by The Fashion Institute of Technology, New York in association with Yale University Press

Graduation is in the air, and here, at YUP we prepare for the final commencement ceremonies with Yale University president Richard Levin presiding, as he will retire from office at the end of this academic year. Following The Work of the University, Levin’s new book, The Worth of the University, captures the essence of university leadership. In addressing topics as varied as his personal sources of inspiration, the development of Asian universities, and the university’s role in promoting innovation and economic growth, Levin challenges the reader to be more engaged, more creative, more innovative, and above all, a better global citizen—a beautiful bookend to Levin’s lifetime of continuing service to universities’ great community of ideas.

It’s Jewish American Heritage Month in the United States, and we have the newly released paperback edition of Mark Kurlansky’s acclaimed biography Hank Greenberg: The Hero Who Didn’t Want to Be One, new from the Jewish Lives series. The newest biography in the series is Saul Friedländer’s Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt, which appraises Kafka’s life and work, tracing his personal anguish as reflected in his writings and showing how earlier censorship efforts concealed crucial aspects of Kafka’s individuality. And we’ll add more to the conversation from another major biography published this year:  Susan Jacoby ’s The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought, with Jacoby’s post titled “The Great Agnostic and First American Male Feminist” already available right here on the Yale Press Log.   

Find out more about James Barilla and his book, My Backyard Jungle: The Adventures of an Urban Wildlife Lover Who Turned His Yard into Habitat and Learned to Live with It, on Facebook or on the My Backyard Jungle website—and we want to hear your stories and experiences of your own backyard adventures! Similarly, we’ll hear from Akiko Busch on the past and present of citizen science in The Incidental Steward: Reflections on Citizen Science, recounting her excursions in the natural world and offers insights into the unexpected rewards of becoming a steward of place, beginning with the story of her own home in New York’s Hudson Valley.

And if you missed the post about our Earth Day giveaways, there’s still time to enter with your Goodreads account to win a copy of these two books, as well as Peter Crane’s Ginkgo: The Tree That Time Forgot, Clive Hamilton’s Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering, and James “Gus” Speth’s America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy, all part of our month-long coverage!