Ken’s Blog

Ahh, my love-hate relationship with Whale Wars begins anew. Instead of flooding the main blog thread, I’m moving it here.

kn

Even though I don’t always agree with their tactics and approach, Paul Hudson and the Sea Shepherds are better than nothing.

Watching the Whale Wars show on Animal Planet, you get to see how they do what they do…and you get to see how poorly they manage their crew.

I guess when all you know is militant behavior to get what you need done, you forget that you need people to work for you. There’s no doubt that there are a lot of people willing to help or donate but just like the fitness industry, there’s a point where you’re spending more time dealing with churn than dealing with your mission.

A while back, I was working on a product that was going to help out the fitness industry (read: gyms). One thing that killed me was the fact that there was a known statistic (and this was for 2002 or something so you can extrapolate a bit here) wherein the fitness industry brought in $1.7 million new members in the US…and lost $1.4 million. And, the primary focus of gyms then tended to be membership, namely getting new members to replace the lost ones.

The problem? The average person would join (New Year’s resolution, coming event, summer, whatever the reason), work out for a little while before giving up, let their credit card get charged a bit longer before they realize they were wasting money and canceled their membership. So, instead of spending time keeping members motivated and keeping that revenue flowing, they were turning tail and trying to get the next sucker in.

So, instead of spending less money just retaining people (usually retention is cheaper), the gyms would waste it with some new plan to get members in (I’m sure a lot of you have encountered some promotion to get you in the door).

Back to Whale Wars. I just wanted the episode where they docked and lost a number of people, including some key crew members. The captain and his 1st and 2nd mates are all confident about their ability to get new crew members so they didn’t care about the problem at hand (their poor management skills). They’re reassuring themselves that it’s all about body count. But, they are already talking about the new “green” recruits.

What they’re missing is all that experience that left with those crew members that aren’t returning. They’ve got to train a lot of people again and have increased risk as those new “green” recruits are going to make mistakes that could cost time or worse…lives. It’s funny how arrogant self-righteous people tend to get.

All it would have taken is a little more attention to detail and a realization that the captain needs to take care of his crew, not kill them all trying to win the battle. There were these various cases like when the 1st mate left a line slack (he said it wasn’t but thankfully video doesn’t lie) and almost killed four crew members or when the two crew members came back from risking their lives hopping onto a Japanese whaling ship (we’re talking about international waters where the captain could decide to defend his ship by shooting them) and the captain decided to stay on the bridge rather than walk up to the two men and shaking their hands.

A good leader gives his crew some love even if it’s tough or at least minimal. Said leader also recognizes faults or problems and doesn’t let personal issues risk lives. Just because his friend is the 1st mate doesn’t mean the 1st mate can’t do wrong. Sure he needs to support his officers but not if they’re fucking up.

The show goes on…the Sea Shepherds are fighting the good fight, even if it means beating the crew up with each trip out to sea. Maybe they’ll accomplish their goals but you’d think that instead of spraying water at the flames, they’d figure out that it’d be more effective to put out the source. I know their charter is all about “law enforcement” but it’s sort of pointless if the criminals keep coming.

kn