Saluting Nevil Shute
I just read “Kindling,” my favorite novel by Nevil Shute. I first learned about the author in 2007, when I heard Herbert Meyer speak. He recommended Shute’s 1938 book “Kindling” and called it “a book every teacher should read.”
This 76 year old book contains important lessons for leaders.
“Kindling” tells the story of one man who reverses the fortunes of a fictional shipbuilding town in depression-era England. It contrasts the efficacy of government fiscal policy with the power of a single person with a cause and illustrates lessons about accountability and taking responsibility to make a better future rather than waiting for someone to do it for you. When I first recommended this book, I said it was one that members of the clergy should read. Today, I’d add that it would also be worthwhile reading for members of Congress. His belief that free markets solve problems more effectively than politicians and bureaucrats is a message that conflicts with the belief of the political class that brilliant speeches and more laws will make the world a better place.
“Kindling” made me an enthusiastic fan of Nevil Shute, who’s best known as the author of “On the Beach.” Since then, I’ve read his 1950 novel “A Town Like Alice” and his last novel, published in 1960, “Trustee from the Tool Room.” Fans of Nevil Shute voted these novels their top two favorites among the 25 books he wrote.
Nevil Shute Norway was born in London in 1899.
As a teenager, his father served as Irish postmaster and young Nevil served as a stretcher-bearer in the Easter Rising in 1916. During his adult life, he was an engineer, aviator, yachtsman, entrepreneur, racecar driver and author of two dozen novels. He was truly a renaissance man who wrote under the pen name Nevil Shute to protect his aeronautical engineering career. I admire him as one who believed in private enterprise and the power of the free market.
He was also a man who put his money where his mouth was. Fed up with high taxes and the bureaucratic government of post-WWII England, he moved to Australia in 1950.
His biography traces his free market beliefs back to 1931, when as a young engineer, he was involved in a competition to build competing air ships. One—the R100—was built privately, and the other—the R101—was built by a government-run entity. The competition ended when the R101 failed. Shute believed this failure symbolized the unsoundness of central planning. One of his biographers said this experience “bred in him an almost pathological distrust of politicians and civil servants.”
Why mention Nevil Shute in a blog about leadership?
Read the book and ask yourself three questions:
- If you felt unchallenged by your work, would you have the courage to hit the reset button as did Henry Warren, the main character in “Kindling”?
- If you made a big mistake, would you accept the consequences as Henry Warren did, or would you play the victim à la the rich, famous and politically connected?
- Are you attempting to live your life to have a positive impact on others, like Henry Warren, who changes the lives of the residents of Sharples, the “Ruined City” in Shute’s book?