" I Can Only Compete Through My Crew."

Simon Walker, 32
Managing Director, Challenge Business
Plymouth, England

"I won't do it. I've got a bad back." When Simon Walker recalls his most difficult challenges as a leader, those words of resistance light up like a theater marquee. In his first command of a large sailing yacht, Walker endured every leader's nightmare: A member of his own team called him out.

The year was 1994, and Walker was a skipper in the Spitsbergen sailing expedition, a seven-week-long journey from Plymouth, England to Svalbard, an island halfway between Norway and the North Pole. A native of Shrewsbury, England, Walker was 26 years old, just five years removed from the University of Manchester, where he had graduated with a degree in computer engineering. Some of the crew members were twice his age.

At 8 AM one day, Walker and his crew lined up on the boat's foredeck and prepared to take in the 100-pound anchor. "There was one particular guy who probably drank a few too many beers the night before. Suddenly, he says he's got a bad back -- right in front of the entire crew," Walker recalls. "Everyone knows his back is fine. So all eyes turn to me to see what I'm going to do. Do I confront him? Do I let him get away with it? I had a split second to decide."

Walker decided to be "unreasonably reasonable." He'd play the guy's game. "The only way to hold on to my authority was to make him look stupid. I told him to trade places with this little woman, Kirsten, who was at the wheel. Now, this big hulking fellow has just lost his place to someone barely 5 feet tall. The next day, I didn't let him take the anchor or the helm. I had him go below and make tea. 'The lads will need a cup after their hard work,' I told him, 'and we don't want to put a strain on your bad back.' Wouldn't you know, his back magically healed -- and he went on to become one of the stars of the expedition."

Of all the environments for testing one's ability to build a winning team and to be a leader, one of the toughest is the deck of a racing yacht, a place where Walker has spent much of his adult life. He's sailed across the Atlantic Ocean seven times. He's led two expeditions to the Arctic Ocean. He won the first Teacher's Whiskey Round Britain Challenge race in 1995. But in the world of sailing, the toughest race of all is the BT Global Challenge, a 30,000-mile marathon "the wrong way" around the planet -- that is, against prevailing winds and currents. More people have traveled in space than have circumnavigated the globe the wrong way. Walker has done it twice, the first time as a first mate. The second time, at age 28, he was the youngest skipper ever to compete in the event.

Now, instead of leading a crew of 14 people, Walker heads an organization of 120. As the managing director of Plymouth-based Challenge Business, Walker is the point man for a massive undertaking: vetting the crews, selecting the skippers, lining up the sponsors, and shotgunning the logistics for sailing's toughest races. As you read this, the 12 yachts competing in the BT Global Challenge 2000 are racing furiously down the coast of South America, bound for Buenos Aires by mid-November.

The concept behind the Global Challenge is straightforward and ultrademocratic: to give ordinary people -- many of whom have no sailing experience -- a chance to take on the challenge of their lives and sail around the globe. The lessons that the race imparts are rich and universal. If you want to learn what it really takes to be a leader, then spend some time navigating the challenges of this race.

The BT Global Challenge serves up a big-time test on several fronts. First, it is physically daunting. Crews must battle violent weather, mind-numbing fatigue, injuries, 100-degree heat in the tropics, and lacerating cold in the Southern Ocean. Andrea Bacon, 32, who crewed on the yacht Group 4 during the 1996-1997 BT Global Challenge, recalls that on the first night out they hit gale-force winds, and 10 members of the crew became violently seasick. "That meant that four people were left to manage the boat," Bacon says. "They couldn't go off watch. They had to keep working around the clock. Then we went to another extreme: We hit incredibly high temperatures as we approached the equator. The steel boat just heats up, and down below it's like an oven. There's no air, and you lie in your bunk just saturated in sweat. You can't sleep. You can't eat. But every six hours, you've got to go back on deck and take your shift."

Even as the race physically drains you, it tests your mental agility. Both skipper and crew must cope with equipment failure, make complex tactical decisions on the fly, and stay nimble enough to keep up with weather and ocean conditions that are forever changing. But above all, the race tests a leader's ability to lead. Recognizing that, such companies as British Airways, Microsoft, and Xerox have joined with the UK consulting group Inspiring Performance Ltd. and Oxfordshire's Henley Management College to study team and leadership dynamics during this year's race.