Polar explorer Tim Jarvis says survival, in business as in the wilds of Antarctica, is all about preparation and process Tim Jarvis has a photograph of a polar bear he takes with him when he talks about his ice or environmental expeditions "The thing is," he says, "not everyone wants to save them. They're not a sufficient driver, people want something more tangible, closer to home. It's all sales. You've got to understand the motivations of the people you're trying to change the behaviour of. It's good advice, sage stuff from a man who has made a career of finding himself in at the deep end, and who is now repackaging much of his experience as an aid to develop leadership skills and motivations for the corporate world. And the demand is enormous, 850 public servants came to hear Mr Jarvis talk earlier this year in Adelaide while the exotic and glamorous Brunei, Singapore and New York, call with some frequency. Environmental conferences and the likes of Samsung are ever keen, not to mention a Christmas TV chat in New York with the doyenne of Stateside interviewers, NBC's Ann Curry. Trek down to the Antarctic wearing 100-year-old clothes with equipment of the same vintage and, it seems, everyone in the business world wants you to talk to them. "A rich vein of material," says Tim. Which makes sense as Tim Jarvis, AM, Adelaide resident and explorer extraordinaire, has much to say. Earlier this year he led a six man team on a voyage to retrace the footprints of the early 20th century British explorer, Sir Ernest Shackleton, and his role in engineering what Tim terms, 'the greatest survival story ever'. Shackleton led a rescue mission 1500 kilometres across the Southern Ocean to safety in 1916 after his ship, the Endurance, gave way to crushing pack ice and slipped to the seabed. He saved all his men. The thing about Tim is that he's coming very much from the performance end, there's a gravitas that captures, you listen. It's akin to investors scrambling for nuggets at a Warren Buffet shareholder conference. The complex rendered simple, truisms put into plain English, all borne of a scale we can't relate to directly but love to hear about nonetheless. A good leader has to get the right team and understand the motivations of people who want to participate. I really believe in formulating a team through doing as opposed to a CV, expectation management on behalf of a leader is very important," he says. When Shackleton's ship went down, the next day he said, 'Now we'll go home'. He had no way of delivering that but he had a plan and set out a proper course of action. People do respond to being told there is a plan but they are very adept at seeing through bluff and blind optimism. Plans equal organisation in Tim's world. Travelling in these very remote places you really have to impose your own framework, it's breaking the enormity of the whole thing into the manageable. If you become adept at this milestone setting in the absence of anything being provided to you, you can really retain your focus among it all. The reasons you are doing it all evaporate when you're dropped on a piece of ice and you have to have a structure to deal with it. I am good at setting goals and milestones to get me there. Good at retaining a focus on outcome. A nomad by upbringing and choice, Tim moved to Adelaide in 1997 to manage a project to monitor the health of Murray Darling basin. A four-month stint with Holden, audits to improve energy efficiency and reduce waste followed. The key to success there was to call the initiatives waste optimisation. Even then I realised among certain demographics that the environmental message doesn't get any traction. A mistake the environmental movement makes is to make same assumptions that everyone thinks the same as them. Hence the polar bears analogy. Process concerns Tim greatly, particularly in corporate Australia. The key thing in industry is to never substitute process for outcome, you have to be flexible on the process and keep on re-evaluating its effectiveness. Is Australia too process driven? We have a particular model we have always followed, largely a commodities and export hub and in that respect we have a traditional business model that has always worked. It's a bit like a developing country model in that respect, and I don't mean this disrespectfully, we dig a lot of stuff out of ground and ship it to next person. Is that the best model? Examine everything even if you feel you can manage the risks says Tim. In expeditions everything has to be put on the table and considered. Theory is a great motivator for driving an accurate risk assessment. There were 171 things his team felt could go wrong, he says. It's important be honest about tabling those. Seventy thousand words in 53 days post trip made for a book, Shackleton Epic, already in its first reprint and Tim's last individual contribution but the achievement as ever is communal. "A team effort par excellence" he says.