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Dr. Joe MacInnis relaxes at the beach in front of his home in Delray Beach.

Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star

MacInnis with film director James Cameron.

Photo provided

By Cheryl Blackerby

    Dr. Joe MacInnis can see the Atlantic from his home in Delray Beach, but when he looks at that blue expanse, he sees more than the rest of us.
    He pictures the Titanic, which he explored by submarine, 2.5 miles beneath the surface of the ocean. He sees the first polar undersea station under the ice of the Arctic Ocean, which he helped build.
    In his long career as a pioneer in deep-sea medicine, the physician-scientist has himself led 30 expeditions and logged more than 5,000 hours under the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic oceans. He’s seen many close calls, and he’s seen leadership that saved the day.
    In his 10th book, Deep Leadership: Essential Insights from High-Risk Environments, MacInnis, a Canadian who lives in Toronto 10 months out of the year, describes 12 “essential traits of leadership.”  
    On a Saturday morning in May, after getting a haircut at Colby’s Barber Shop in Ocean Ridge, MacInnis relaxed in a chair outside and discussed his book. He was squeezing in time at home between back-to-back speaking engagements, hence the haircut.
    He tells corporate executives and university students around the world that leadership is needed to conquer today’s crises, particularly global warming and resulting extreme weather and rising seas.
    He modestly calls himself an accidental leader. “I was a leader in very threatening environments. I realized I had been leading by instinct,” he said. “I wanted to help people get a sense of the structure and dynamics of leadership.”
    One of the leaders described in the book is film director James Cameron, whom MacInnis worked with on numerous expeditions for documentaries including the Discovery Channel’s Titanic;  the 3-D film Aliens of the Deep; and National Geographic’s Deepsea Challenge, Cameron’s 35,000-foot dive to the deepest place on Earth. The film comes out in August.
    Cameron’s nine-part documentary on climate change, Years of Living Dangerously, is being shown on Showtime.
    The three most important leadership qualities, which Cameron and the other leader/explorers in the book have, he said, are empathy, eloquence and endurance.
    “A leader must have deep empathy for the team, for the task, for the technology, for the terrain, for humans and for the ocean,” he explained. “A leader must be eloquent and express ideas and put them into words that are accurate, brief and clear. And they must have the endurance to get the task done.”
    The world desperately needs leadership on climate change, he said. “If we’re going to navigate our way through this problem, we need leaders. We’ve all been in denial about this,” he said.
    “We will get through this,” he said, confident that leaders will step forward.
    MacInnis’ book, published by Knopf Canada, is not a PowerPoint list of character traits, but a riveting account of leaders in extreme and dire circumstances who have saved the day.
    The book reads like a novel with hair-raising heroics described in jaw-dropping detail, such as the night National Geographic electronics technician Mike Cole saved the eight-man crew from a fire in a tent five miles north of the Arctic Circle.
    The team had been worried about the constant threat of cracks in the ice beneath their feet, but the real danger had come from a fire in a stove’s leaking gas line. Cole found an extinguisher in the dark, and risked his life fighting the flame until he put it out.
    On MacInnis’ first dive to the Titanic, there was leadership of another kind.  The dive was a long one — three hours to the sea floor, six hours on the wreck and three hours back to the surface — in the $20 million French research sub the Nautile.
    He admits to some trepidation about that first dive to the shipwreck.  “When it comes to this kind of depth, I have a PhD in fear,” he said.
    The French pilot saw the sweat on MacInnis’ face and he parked the sub, brought out sandwiches and a small bottle of Beaujolais blanc. MacInnis, the pilot and copilot enjoyed a picnic about 2.5 miles below the surface of the ocean.
    The offer of food and drink was not just a friendly gesture, but the leadership of a pilot who saw his fellow scientist experiencing stress — a leadership trait MacInnis calls “high-empathy communication.”
    The pilot’s gesture worked. “I saw the shattered stern where so many lives were lost,” MacInnis wrote. “I was anxious, but my heart beat at a reasonable rate. I was with two men whose emotional awareness diminished my fear.”

Deep Leadership: Essential Insights from High-Risk Environments by Joe MacInnis is published by Knopf Canada and is available in hardcover for $25.99.