Whale Rider Leadership

A lot has been written about the strong family message in Whale Rider, and there is no mistaking that this story of intergenerational love and conflict is, on the surface, about the mending of a broken family, but there is another aspect that hasn't been written about—or at least only touched on—and that's the movie's theme. It isn't about family or even the need to honor the hand in glove relationship of tradition and progress. At root, Whale Rider is one of the best pictures about leadership that has been made in years, a movie that many of our corporate and political leaders would do well to make a beeline to see.
Whale Rider follows the struggles of young Pai to win the love and respect of her gruff and continually disappointed grandfather Koro. A member of a fiercely proud and ancient Maori tribe, Pai—through a tragic twist of fate—has broken the unbroken line of male firstborn children, and hence cannot inherit the leadership of the tribe from her grandfather.
Pai secretly learns the lessons as well, first by spying on her grandfather and later with the help of her "second born son" uncle . It becomes apparent quite quickly to everyone except her grandfather that Pai is more than worthy to take on the mantle of leadership. How she finally proves that is in a daring act of bravery that pushes the movie into the realm of the mythic. Along the way, Koro learns a valuable lesson that leadership has nothing to do with birth order or gender, mending the family, the tribe, and—quite literally—the