True North Leadership and the Portfire 40

A little over a month ago I was approached by Ryan Skinner of 59° 56′ N blog about participating in an interesting project called the Portfire40.

Ryan does a great job explaining it on his blog as well as on James Tweed’s Coracle Online Shipping Podcasts which you listen to here:

The USCG podstar Ben Strong from AMVER did a great short video introducing the concept too.

Other founding contributors to the Portfire 40 include my former Messing About In Ships cohost and CEO of gCaptain.com, Captain John Konrad; the always interesting Kennebec Captain;  Bob Couttie’s “tell it like it is” Maritime Accident Casebook and the “help-full” After Office Hours. I’m sure there will be more along the journey.

Most Sea-Fever readers know that I am also the founder and editor of Weekly Leader, a website and podcast dedicated to the latest leadership news, views and best practices and consistently one of the top PostRank leadership and management websites.  I also used to contribute a leadership column to MarineNews; here are a couple old articles I was able to locate quickly: Leadership and the Sea (PDF) and Assuming a New Leadership Role.

So what interested me about the Portfire40 project is that it’s actually about leadership and not necessarily about authority or power.  It’s the people who are passionate about and driven to making a difference, not for money or prestige, but because it’s the right thing to do. To me, it’s reaches back to the best of the old maritime tradition of taking care of the ship and your shipmates, which I also believe is a good foundation on which to build your own leadership, even if you never intend to go to sea.

So I’m looking forward to meeting some new maritime leaders and hearing their sea stories. Maybe we can even get a few of them onto the Weekly Leader podcast. It should be fun.