The Energy of Success

CHAPTER 9The Creative Zone

In January 2009, I spent a month in Norway consulting for Radisson Blu Hotel & Resorts. I started down south in Kristiansand and worked my way up via Stavanger to Oslo. I continued north through Alesund and Trondheim, ultimately finishing my tour crossing the fjords via train, ending my time in Norway at my favorite northern lights fishing town, Tromso.

Every winter, pods of killer whales migrate to northern Norway, specifically around Tromso, in search of herring. As a cohesive team, they've created a hunting strategy called carousel feeding, enclosing the herring into a “bait ball,” which occurs when fish are tightly packed into a spherical formation. From there, they work together to slap the fish with their tails so that they can pick them off one by one, ensuring the entire family is fed.

National Geographic photographer Brian Skerry swims with these magnificent creatures from Norway to New Zealand, Patagonia to South Africa. He shares incredible footage and insights on the cohesiveness of these apex predators and how their collaborative cultures are not so different from our own. So much so that they have diverse tastes, communication styles, and traditions based on their locations all over the world!

In an Earth Day episode podcast on April 13, 2021, Skerry explained the synergy of these mammals' operation. “It can be very vocal…. In fact, as that polar night emerges and it's dark all the time, they can no longer rely on just sight or visual ...