The Camino Way: Lessons in Leadership from a Walk Across Spain

by Victor Prince

Overview

In this leadership journey unlike any other, Victor Prince shares the lessons he learned while on his pilgrimage and guides readers on their own Camino de Santiago.

Business coach and former COO Victor Prince began his 500-mile trek on the Camino de Santiago as one person—driven, work-focused, and highly competitive—and he finished it a completely different one—more balanced, caring, and present in the moment. As he made his way on foot through rugged countryside and medieval towns, the life-altering journey allowed him to reflect, test his will, and join a community of strangers on a shared mission.

As Prince did while on his journey, you will discover the seven essential leadership lessons inspired by the values emblazoned on the back of every pilgrim’s passport, including:

• Treat each day as its own adventure
• Make others feel welcome
• Learn from those who’ve walked before
• Consider your impact on those who follow

Each year hundreds of thousands trek across this 500-mile leadership journey like no other. Within these pages, learn the life-changing principles they are discovering!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814438244
Publisher:	AMACOM
Publication date:	07/13/2017
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Victor Prince is a leadership consultant and speaker. He previously served as COO of the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and strategy consultant with Bain Company. He holds an MBA in Finance from Wharton.

Read an Excerpt

The Camino Way

Lessons in Leadership from a Walk Across Spain

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By Victor Prince

AMACOM

Copyright © 2017 Victor Prince
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8144-3824-4

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CHAPTER 1

The History of the Camino de Santiago

IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE NINTH CENTURY, A SPANISH BISHOP NAMED Teodomiro decided to investigate reports of strange lights and sounds coming from a hill in the northwest of Spain. After climbing the hill, the bishop discovered a site with three tombs, and he declared one of them to be the remains of St. James (Santiago in Spanish), one of the twelve disciples of Jesus. According to the Camino legend, Jesus tasked his disciples with going out to different parts of the world and spreading their new faith. James went to Spain; he later returned to Judea and was killed by the local authorities. His associates put his body, by itself, in a boat in the Mediterranean Sea. The boat drifted to the coast of the northwest corner of Spain, where it washed up onshore, covered in scallop shells. Locals found the boat and buried the remains on a nearby hill. That burial site was what the bishop Teodomiro declared he had discovered about 800 years later. To celebrate, the king ordered a small church to be built on the site over the tomb. Word about the discovery spread, and people started to visit the shrine. In the year 950, an intrepid bishop named Gotescalc from LePuy, France traveled 800 miles to see the shrine "to beg mercy and help from God and Santiago," becoming the first pilgrim to be recorded as visiting the site.

To understand how the Camino de Santiago developed after that first pilgrim, it helps to understand how other pilgrimages cut a path through European history before the Camino. Even in pre-Roman-Empire times, the custom existed of visiting hallowed places to get spiritual help. Individuals from Europe probably started pilgrimages to Jerusalem and the Christian-history sites (the "Holy Land") as early as the second or third century. By the fourth century, pilgrimage to the Holy Land was probably an established concept, with the Bible as a guidebook.

Once the concept of Christian pilgrimage became established, a new destination for pilgrims arose to compete by the eighth century — Rome. As the capital of the growing Catholic Church, Rome offered its own religious sights-to-see as a draw, in addition to Roman Empire ruins. The spread of the Catholic Church to northern Europe around that time likely created a natural flow of people to and from the church's capital city. In addition to Rome's draw, it was also an easier destination than the Holy Land for European pilgrims. It was both closer and under Christian control. The network of old roads originally built to connect the Roman Empire territories back to Rome probably helped, too.

The rise of the pilgrimage to Rome helped popularize the concept of pilgrimage. Even if few people would ever do a pilgrimage themselves, more would know what pilgrimage was. References to "pilgrims" started appearing in historical documents. Rome and Tours, France, were mentioned as pilgrimage destinations and people were reported believing pilgrimage was a way to forgive their sins. Pilgrims were recognized for their distinctive appearance with their clothing and equipment. The pilgrim "brand" had been born.

In addition to pilgrims, Rome got some very unwelcome visitors in the year 846 in the form of a large Arab raiding party that sacked the city. This was the latest in a series of attacks from Arabs in the south that made the people of Rome feel uneasy. Rome must certainly have become a less attractive pilgrimage destination as a result.

The discovery of Santiago's remains was declared sometime around, but before, the year 842. (The king who ordered the building of the first church on the spot died in 842.) The timing was fortuitous. Just as the concept of pilgrimage had become established, one of its biggest destinations — Rome — was becoming less attractive. In addition, that northern area of Spain had pushed back the Muslim invaders in the century before. Getting a stream of Christian visitors was also probably helpful in keeping the Muslims at bay.

The century between the building of the first shrine to St. James's remains and the first recorded pilgrim to the site (that of Gotescalc in the year 950) was an eventful time. It was the heart of the "Viking Age" in Europe, gunpowder was used in battle for the first time in China, and the Mayan Empire was collapsing in the "undiscovered" Americas. In the northwest corner of Spain, religious and royal officials were working hard to promote their area as a new pilgrimage destination. The small church at the shrine was replaced by a bigger one in 899. King Ramiro I ordered people to pay a tribute to the church in Santiago. Ramiro's grandson, King Alfonso III, sent a letter in 906 to the clergy in Tours (a pilgrimage site itself) in response to their questions about this new shrine, demonstrating that word about the shrine was spreading.

The next two centuries (c. 950–c. 1150) were eventful, with the Norman conquest of England, the first European crusade to retake Jerusalem, the founding of the first universities (Bologna and Oxford), and Leif Erikson's landing in modern-day Canada. In the northwest corner of Spain, more pilgrims were coming to see the shrine to Santiago, and the locals were building infrastructure to support them. As the local Christian kings in Spain pushed out the Moors, they left behind roads and castles built to support those military efforts. A new basilica (the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela) was started in 1075 and new settlements emerged among the pilgrim roads, such as Puente de la Reina, founded in 1090.

In addition to physical infrastructure, local church officials, particularly Bishop Don Diego Gelmirez (1100 — 1139), were laying religious groundwork for a pilgrim superhighway. Gelmirez successfully lobbied Rome to get the right to grant indulgences and remissions of sins, in those years in which the feast of St. James (July 25) fell on a Sunday. Because indulgences were typically only granted in Rome, this made Santiago even more attractive as a pilgrimage destination.

The final piece of Camino infrastructure that emerged in this time was an innovation — the travel guide. Around the year 1140, a compilation of documents about the miracles of St. James and the pilgrimage to his shrine emerged out of Santiago. It came to be known as the Codex Calixtinus, named after Pope Calixtus II (1121 — 1124), a pope Bishop Gelmirez had successfully lobbied. Beyond the religious content, one part of the Codex centered on describing Santiago as a destination, the routes to get there, and logistical information on the way. It even made the earliest known reference to the souvenir trade in the Christian West.

A lot happened in the four centuries between the emergence of the Codex Calixtus and the start of the Protestant Reformation (1517). Christopher Columbus, Marco Polo, Johannes Gutenberg, and William "Braveheart" Wallace all lived in this time. In the northwest corner of Spain, the combination of indulgences and the Codex Calixtus were turning Santiago de Compostela into a top pilgrimage destination. Pilgrims started appearing from England before the close of the twelfth century. In the fifteenth century, interest in Santiago had spread further, with records of pilgrimage to Santiago starting to appear from individual travelers from Italy, France, England, Germany, Sweden, and Poland. Amazingly, this period of growth included two tragic stages in European history — the Black Death plague (1340s) and the Hundred Years War (1337–1453).

The recorded reasons for pilgrimage are scarce, but the stories that did survive center on the need to get sins forgiven — voluntarily or involuntarily. After the murder of Thomas Becket in 1170, for example, English king Henry II promised to make a pilgrimage as penance for his role, and he asked the pope to choose between Rome, Jerusalem, and Santiago as his destination.

Some pilgrimages were not to ask forgiveness, but to ask for relief. Between 1456 and 1483, for example, four separate cities in Spain, Italy, and France sent representatives to Santiago to beg for help in lifting plagues from their cities. Some pilgrimages may have had less spiritual reasons. Some trips were probably as much for tourism as religion, like a German party of 1387 who admitted as much in their safe-passage letter. And, as always, some pilgrimages may have had anything but spiritual reasons, such as running away from the law or from servitude.

How many pilgrims were there during this peak age of the Camino de Santiago? There are no reliable statistics on pilgrims reaching Santiago, but a few points of data might give a sense of scale. A narrative from an Italian pilgrim in the 1600s mentioned that the Royal Hospice in Roncesvalles fed "up to thirty-thousand pilgrims a year," a number that sounds more like hyperbole than statistics, but may help set an upper-bound sense of the scale of pilgrims at the time. A register of the Hospital de la Reina for the year 1594 logged 16,767 pilgrims, an average of about 45 per day, and on some days they had more than 200.

Whatever the number of pilgrims during this golden age, it must have been only a fraction of the hundreds of thousands per year that are recorded now. For example, the estimated 3,600 pilgrims that came from England during the entire 14th century is less than the number that come from the United Kingdom in one year now (5,417 in 2015). Any annual number of pilgrims in the thousands during the twelfth through fifteenth centuries should still be considered impressive, given the challenges of travel and the much smaller total population of Europe.

Pilgrimage on the Camino started to decline in the 16th century. Other methods than pilgrimage to get indulgences had emerged a century earlier. The Protestant Reformation further knocked down the reputation of indulgences.

Part of the decline of pilgrimage on the Camino probably arose from its popularity as well. Records from the beginning of the period suggest that some poor people began using the system of pilgrim hospices not for pilgrimage, but more as the equivalent of modern homeless shelters. While the number of pilgrims was decreasing, the costs of supporting the hospices built for the larger crowds of pilgrims of previous centuries remained. Hospices were selling off land to meet their operating costs in the 18th century, and many closed, or were destroyed, in the Napoleonic Wars.

The Camino was still alive enough in 1779 for future US president John Adams to remark in his diary, during a trip across Spain to France along part of the route: "Upon the Supposition that this is the place of the Sepulture of Saint James, there are great numbers of Pilgrims, who visit it, every Year, from France, Spain, Italy and other parts of Europe, many of them on foot."

Pilgrimage to Santiago never died out completely, but only about seventy pilgrims were thought to have traveled the route in 1979. Then an old trick seems to have started a rebirth — a new Camino travel guide. Elias Valina Sampedro, a priest in a town along the Camino, published the final version of El Camino de Santiago, Guia del Pilgrim in 1985, and it became a model for future guides. Just as with the emergence of the Codex Calixtinus 800 years before, once a guidebook hit the market, people started coming.

Once pilgrims started coming, pilgrims started writing narratives, as they had hundreds of years before. Between 1985 and 1995, more than a dozen pilgrimage narratives were published in English. The Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho published his own book about the Camino in 1987, a year before his blockbuster book, The Alchemist, was published. In 2000, Shirley MacLaine, a famous American film actress, published her own Camino narrative, which became a New York Times best seller. A German pilgrim's narrative in 2006 became a best seller in Germany. The 2010 film about the Camino called The Way, starring Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez, seems to have been a key factor in increasing awareness of the Camino in the USA: since that film came out, requests for an American Camino credential have quadrupled from about 1,600 in 2010 to about 6,400 in 20 1 5. Pilgrims from other countries point to other recent books or films as their inspiration to walk the Camino. In short, the Camino de Santiago is officially back as it approaches its 1300th birthday.

Eleven centuries after that first recorded pilgrimage, in the year 2013, I was one of 215,880 people from all over the world who were recorded as pilgrims to the same shrine. The small church had grown to be a great cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, a Spanish city of about 100,000 people that had grown around the shrine. My fellow pilgrims and I had walked roughly the same path the first pilgrims took, now known collectively in Spanish as El Camino de Santiago — the Path of Santiago.

CHAPTER 2

The Spirit of The Camino

THE CAMINO BEGINS WITH ONE DOCUMENT AND ENDS WITH ANOTHER. Before starting their journey, pilgrims get a Pilgrim's Credential, informally known as a pilgrim, or peregrino, passport. I received my pilgrim passport from the nonprofit group that supports peregrinos from the US — American Pilgrims on the Camino. That credential serves two practical purposes. It identifies travelers to the low-cost hostels along the way that are only open to pilgrims. That helps the hostels keep out non-pilgrims looking for cheap accommodations. The passport is also where a pilgrim collects stamps at each stop along the way to prove his/her journey. Each hostel has a unique stamp with its name, location, and sometimes a logo. By adding a date to their stamp, the hostels can enforce policies to move pilgrims on after a day or two to make room for new pilgrims.

Upon arriving at the end of the trail in Santiago, pilgrims take their stamp-filled Credential to get the other bookend on a Camino — the Compostela certificate. Written in Latin, the Compostela is the certificate to show that a pilgrim has walked at least the last hundred kilometers of the trail. An official in the Oficina del Peregrino (Office of Pilgrims) from the Santiago de Compostela cathedral reviews each pilgrim's passport and asks for the starting point and the reason for the journey. The official then writes the pilgrim's name and date completed in Latin and hands it to the pilgrim with a final, official "Buen Camino."

I will always remember my trip to that office. It was part of a bittersweet day. I was elated that I had reached my goal but sad that my journey was over. I could sense similar emotions from other pilgrims' faces in line. Some of those faces were familiar; many were unfamiliar. All pilgrims from every Camino route into Santiago de Compostela converge at that office on the final day. When I finally got my Compostela certificate, my first thought was that I didn't know my first name had a Latin form, Victorem. My second thought was how to protect my priceless new document until it was on my wall at home.

If my house were on fire and I could only rescue one document, I would choose my crumpled and messy Credential over my Compostela certificate. The Compostela certificate reminds me that I succeeded in the challenge of walking across Spain. But my pilgrim passport reminds me of every step I took along the way to earn that certificate. The Camino is an example of the saying "the journey is its own reward," and the passport is like a record of the journey.

The process of getting a stamp as you check in for the night at the end of every day's walk is a ritual core to every peregrino's experience. Just as the sound of a gavel marks the close of many ceremonies, the thump of a stamp marks the close to each day on the Camino. For a results-driven executive like me, it was a form of immediate gratification on this adventure travel. Another day done — thump!

I remember getting my first stamp. I was excited, so I took a "selfie" picture. I bet most modern pilgrims do that too. I remember being overeager the rest of that first day hiking, getting a stamp at every rest or food break. As I admired my collection of stamps that night over dinner, I realized that I was going to run out of room for stamps if I kept up that pace. From then on, I held myself to just one at check-in each afternoon.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Camino Way by Victor Prince. Copyright © 2017 Victor Prince. Excerpted by permission of AMACOM.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

INTRODUCTION xv

PART I: Meeting the Camino

CHAPTER 1: The History of the Camino de Santiago 5

CHAPTER 2: The Spirit of the Camino 15

PART II: Learning from the Camino

CHAPTER 3: Welcome Each Day, Its Pleasures and Its Challenges 23

CHAPTER 4: Make Others Feel Welcome 37

CHAPTER 5: Live in the Moment 51

CHAPTER 6: Share 65

CHAPTER 7: Feel the Spirit of Those Who Have Come Before You 79

CHAPTER 8: Appreciate Those Who Walk with You Today 93

CHAPTER 9: Imagine Those Who Will Follow You 107

PART III: Applying Lessons from the Camino

CHAPTER 10: The Post-Camino Impact 123

CHAPTER 11: Think About Yourself Differently 127

CHAPTER 12: Think About Others Differently 139

CHAPTER 13: Act Differently 149

PART IV: Sharing the Camino

CHAPTER 14: Find Your Own Camino 163

EPILOGUE 169

APPENDICES

APPENDIX A: What to Know If You Want to Walk the Camino 171

APPENDIX B: The Camino Today 177

SOURCES 179

NOTES 181

INDEX 185

Editorial Reviews

...brilliantly draws continuous connections between the Camino, which started as a religious pilgrimage hundreds of years ago, and contemporary business leadership.” —Foreword Reviews

“What began as a competitive trek became an amazing adventure and career game-changer.” — Retail Observer

“This compelling book tells a wonderful story of self-reflection, self-awareness, and the importance of putting issues at work, life events into perspective.” —PMWorld Journal

“… part-travel, part-leadership lessons book…readers will be inspired by Prince’s expedition and perhaps will even ponder their own Camino discovery.” –Portland Book Review

“…help[s] to find a deeper, slower, more authentic version of ourselves.” –The Globe and Mail

From the Publisher