Sir Ernest Shackleton was not a man you would want on the board. By all accounts, he was hopeless with money. Many friendships were tested by his chaotic personal affairs, while others were lost forever by his compulsive habit of seducing his friends' wives.

With his wheezing lungs, a weak heart and easy charm, he was, as his biographer was later to write, "almost the typical British hero in the age of decline: the glorious failure".

Yet today the great Anglo-Irish adventurer and his famous expedition to the Antarctic are studied around the world in the relentless search for inspirational business leaders.

Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette, the US investment bank, is bulk-buying accounts of his expedition to give to staff as an incentive. At Fidelity Investments, one banker is writing a book on the business lessons of Shackleton, to be called The Shackleton Way.

A Harvard MBA graduate set up a Shackleton School in Boston last year to educate young people through adventure and exploration. According to its founder, Mr Luke I. O'Neill, Shackleton's story contains lessons for business leaders everywhere: "Never give up, don't be afraid to lead, follow your gut, and remember it's about people." A Hollywood film is on the way.

Management theory is a notoriously fickle subject, but even by its standards Shackleton may seem a strange role model - not least because he failed spectacularly in the goal he set himself.

In August 1914 Shackleton set out to cross the entire Antarctic on foot, thereby surpassing Captain Robert Falcon Scott's expedition to the South Pole a couple of years earlier. But by January his ship, the Endurance, had become ice-bound in the Weddell Sea in the south Atlantic, 1,200 miles from civilisation.

When the ice pierced the hull, the party took to three small lifeboats. There followed more than a year battling against ice floes, raging seas and winds in temperatures as low as -100F (-37C).

The expedition survived by eating seals, penguins and their dogs, and by drinking melted ice. Throughout, Shackleton's men were buoyed by his high spirits, conviction and relentless optimism which extended to refereeing football matches on the ice to ward off desperation.

Incredibly, all 28 crew arrived home safely after a small rescue party led by Shackleton sailed hundreds of miles in a small boat to a whaling station in South Georgia to get help.

On his return, the media-savvy Shackleton was able to do in life what Scott could only allude to in the diary discovered next to his frozen body. "Had we lived," Scott famously wrote, "I should have had a tale to tell of hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions, which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman."

From this exceptional study in crisis management and team-building, lessons are being extracted for the corporate world. Yet the puzzle remains: can heroic failure be an attribute of leadership?

"Great leaders have often been humbled by setbacks," argues Ms Sally-Ann Huson, training director at TMI, a training and consultancy organisation.

But Ms Heather Bell, at Hay Management Consultants, is cautious of Shackleton-mania. "I have my doubts. Creating a motivated climate is not enough. Something has to be achieved."

Nevertheless, Barclays Bank is toying with the idea of introducing a few icy gusts of Shackleton into its leadership development programmes. Mr Keith Bleasdale, corporate training director, says the purpose would be to draw "specific learning points" to help shape senior staff.

He cites the ability of Shackleton to identify people's strengths, and the "supportive culture" he fostered on the expedition. "With more and more people working remotely, the focus is now on leadership performance, rather than management," he says. "Shackleton was the ultimate leader in getting the best out of a team."

Banking is a long way from polar exploration and two obvious objections suggest themselves. Shackleton's survival owed a great deal to luck. Even Shackleton confided to his diary that he believed the rescue mission to South Georgia was doomed to failure.

Second, it could be argued that his exceptional leadership was the product of an extreme situation. If your ship is sinking in the ice, your options are limited. Mr Roger Putt, who teaches a course on Shackleton at the Centre for Leadership Studies, based at the University of Exeter, counsels against hero worship based on personality.

"Shackleton had a lot of faults, but as a great situational leader, he cannot really be faulted," he says. "He knew the value of human life above all else and took calculated risks."

Mr Putt argues that there is little point in examining the character of Shackleton because the question of whether leaders are born or made is unanswerable. He believes the approach favoured by the competency movement in organisational psychology, which tries to identify specific character traits in leaders so that companies can recruit the right people, is unwarranted.

"Leadership is what leaders create, not what they have. You can ask what it is that leaders create in leadership and at its most basic level, the answer is that leaders create certainty. People have a clear sense of purpose and values from the leader. Leadership is about the reduction of uncertainty."

In this regard, he maintains, there are few better than Shackleton. A comparable expedition launched in 1913 by the explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson and 23 men aboard the Karluk met a very different fate: after the ship became stuck in ice, the leader abandoned it with a few of his men. Four mutinied, one shot himself, and two died from malnutrition.

Shackletonian leadership will always be that much more difficult from a desk. But there are more relevant uses to which the great man can be put.

Mr Richard Merriweather, who skippered a yacht in the BT Global Challenge in 1996, and today runs corporate leadership and teambuilding courses at sea, hands out accounts of the expedition to crew members before setting sail. It is, he testifies, "a fantastic protection against self-pity".

The Endurance by Caroline Alexander, Bloomsbury, £20 sterling. Endurance by Alfred Lansing, Weidenfeld & Nicolson £12.99 sterling. Roger Putt, Leadership Unleashed, rogerputttalk21.com. An exhibition on Shackleton is running at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, until October 11th.