Upcoming book
By day, Jean Hausser leads a cancer immunotherapy lab at Karolinska Institute (Sweden). By night, the call of polar adventure and the frozen beauty of Antarctica pull at his dreams. From learning to ski from scratch to befriending his fear of heights through a hundred skydives, five years of preparation culminate in a month-long skiing and sailing expedition to the Antarctic Peninsula.
Leaving the shore of South America, he embarks on the adventure of crossing the dreaded waters of the Drake Passage on a 20-meter sailboat and skiing high glaciers riddled with crevasses. But sharing a confined boat with eleven others - with survival depending on every one of them - also surfaces the emotional patterns that Antarctica's vast emptiness leaves nowhere to hide.
This is a book about what a scientist discovers when he brings the same discipline to his own patterns that he applies to research: noticing them in real time, choosing a different response, repairing when he gets it wrong. From a tense breakfast debate to a helm correction in the Drake, from the decision to abort a summit in poor visibility to the quiet competence that keeps an expedition uneventful, he traces the kind of leadership that prevents the crisis rather than starring in one.
For anyone who leads a team under pressure - a research lab pursuing breakthroughs, a startup navigating uncertainty, or an expedition in extreme conditions - and suspects that the hardest person to lead is themselves.
