In recent years the polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton has often been cited as a good role model for business leaders.

His friend, fellow polar explorer, sometime chief, and sometime competitor, Captain Robert Falcon Scott has, by contrast, been unfairly neglected by management theorists. Scott is not perceived as ending up a “winner”: he died, with all four of his companions, on his way home after coming second, albeit a close second, to Roald Amundsen in the race to be the first men to reach the South Pole.

Yet to focus on this tragic end ignores the significance of a career of immense achievement, best described in an excellent biography by Sir Ranulph Fiennes – himself possibly our greatest living adventurer and, as another polar explorer, a man with a full understanding of the challenges Scott faced.

It also misses the point that it is precisely the serious risk of failure, and the consequences of failure, that make any great endeavour – be it a polar expedition or a business venture – worthy of reward.

As much as any entrepreneur, Scott found success on the very edge of what was previously thought possible. His first Antarctic expedition, a decade before his death, was a leap into the unknown. The later achievements of Shackleton and Amundsen were able to build on what that first expedition discovered, but Scott was the pioneer, the man who basically invented modern polar exploration by trial and error.

Indeed, possibly the most interesting thing about Scott’s career is that when he was selected to lead his pioneering first Antarctic expedition he had absolutely no experience of polar exploration.

He was notable only as one of the Royal Navy’s brightest young torpedo officers.

No selection board today would have made such a choice. Obsessed with covering their own behinds, and in thrall to the Cult of the Specialist, they would have insisted on paper “qualifications”, references, and a curriculum vitae of “relevant experience”.

Yet expertise in established thinking is a positive disadvantage when faced with the unknown. Scott succeeded precisely because he was forced to improvise and to rely on his open mind, his willingness to learn from mistakes, his determination to succeed, his ability to organise from scratch, and his energy, which galvanised those around him – the same gifts that have often enabled entrepreneurs to succeed where the products of selection panels have failed.