Whittles Golden Stripes: Leadership on the High Seas

I thought the book was well written and very readable. While most of it was good advice it lacked much that was truly useful.Much was fairly obvious, and often it seemed like to much space was used making points that could have been made much more concisely. It did not help that every point was shoehorned in to a nautical metaphor that mostly did not add much. Most importantly I feel it lacked much real concrete guidance, it gave sound general advice but did not get in to more actionable ways to put it in to practice. While making a big deal of being the first book on leadership aimed at the merchant mariner, it lacked much of substance that really addressed the leadership challenges in that environment as apposed to any other.A final concern is that now and then in the book it would be mentioned the "research shows" or some variation of that. Yet never any details of what the research was or who did it, either in the text or as a footnote. Several of the claims made like that seemed to at best to be over simplified.

Effective leadership saves lives and prevents environmental damage by giving captains and shipping executives the tools they need to manage men and women who work at sea... and this book is chock full of quality leadership tools and principles. The IMO should require that this book be carried aboard every-ship and should be carried in the libraries of every shipping company. -Captain John Konrad, Author of Fire on the Horizon: The Untold Story of the Gulf Oil Disaster

Utterly readable, there are many 'dry' books on the subject of Leadership this is NOT one of them. The real on board examples used to highlight the teaching points make this little book a good read and an excellent text book on the subject for both Land and Sea.

The book is very well written. It is simple, interesting with lot of real life stories and enforces the principles vey well. The language, style and usage of all the ship's equipment for various topics and various models created by the author are all very unqiue and makes it a very useful and well written book.This book is a must to be in the library of every shipping company and more importantly atleast 2 copies to be made available onboard every ship. Every ship managers to actively encourage ship staff especially the Senior officers, to read this book and be benefited by applying the principles and ideas taught in this book. This book will surely go a long way in improving the safety, productivity and crew morale onboard ships.

It’s really just a leadership book with examples changed to a shipboard environment. Anyone with half a brain could take the examples from a regular leadership book and apply them to shipboard life.It’s a different take on things though.