Every year, thousands of small businesses in Nova Scotia take to the sea.
I recently had the opportunity to spend a day on the job with Jerry Harnish, the CEO of one of these businesses. (If you ask him, Jerry’s preferred title is “Captain.”) Lucky for me, it was ‘landing day’ which is the final day of the season when the fisherman haul in all the traps, concluding on-water work; until next season opens, that is. For many Captains (including Jerry), this is also the best damn day of the year. Jerry chooses to celebrate the end of the season with friends taking part in the final sailing, followed by seafood chowder back at the Captain’s house.
During my few hours spent on board, I couldn’t help but admire the incredible trust and teamwork among the crew. There are many lessons that businesses could take from spending time with a crew like this, and I couldn’t help but observe a few parallels.
Jerry is one of 3,200 lobster license-holders in Nova Scotia. The license comes with certain privileges—the corner office can’t be beat—but being a lobster boat captain doesn’t leave a lot of time to enjoy the view. Jerry owns, operates, and maintains his vessel. He recruits and manages his crew and is responsible for their lives and limbs. He sources fuel and bait, brokers sales of his catch, and oversees his P&L. He must be attentive to local conditions (weather, shore price), the calendar (fishing seasons, demand-driving holidays), and global market trends (international demand, in-market prices). And he does all this while attending to the active duties on the boat every single day it sails.
Many enterprises in the modern era believe they’re exempt from the volatilities that have long bedeviled primary industries. After all, Zoom calls still happen in poor weather, and software works in any season.
But in lobster fishing, everything affects your business. Everything is a headwind—the wind very much included. Pain is expected, downturns are inevitable. The principles of infinite growth are humbled by the brutal reality of Mother Nature. Out on the water, there’s only hard work and adaptation. Resiliency is in the blood of a lobster fisherman.
And then, of course, there’s the day-to-day reality of this business. When I volunteered to accompany Jerry on his landing-day run, I didn’t fully understand what I was getting myself into, but I quickly found out.
If you need a lesson in effective teamwork, you can’t do much better than taking a trip on a lobster boat.
I’ve spent my career in tech. But lately, it feels like the tech world is suffering from a crisis of reality. Everything in our industry has become reliant on things of questionable existence: speculative valuations, algorithmic promises, future scale. AI has only deepened this dependency on unreality, with autonomous agents taking over our communication, our spreadsheets, even our code. We’re increasingly building a world based on metrics that no one can really understand, let alone defend. We’ve lost the plot on what we’re all doing here: value has become completely disconnected from physical reality.
No such trick is possible on the water. Out there, each day’s work is precisely measured in pounds and prices.
It’s not that tech has no place in modern lobster fishing—again, Starlink is bolted right next to Jerry’s wheel. But the difference is dependency. If the satellites blink out tomorrow, Jerry can still plot his traps and his journey home with a paper map and a pencil. There is a deep sense of clarity when your livelihood is based on fundamental skills, palpable progress, and results you can see, touch, and weigh.
At Chapter 3, we think about business the way Jerry thinks about lobster fishing. No vanity metrics, no theoretical frameworks that sound good in a boardroom but fall apart on first contact with reality. Just clear objectives, honest assessment of conditions, and the hard work of execution.
