His new book, ‘Hard Ships: Navigating Your Company, Career and Life Through the Fog of Disruption’ (2021, Giersdorf Group LLC), channels his personal and professional experiences into a compelling and motivational read. And, considering the topic, the timing couldn’t be better as cruising emerges from its global shutdown.

Every disruption is a learning opportunity

Giersdorf’s thesis: Every disruption is a learning opportunity.

The book opens with a poem he wrote in 2003 after a ‘perfect storm’ of events that tested him to the extreme. Eventually he stopped fighting the disruption, embraced his new situation, began working with it and new horizons opened. He discovered ‘precious lessons,’ and new ‘north stars’ to navigate by took him to ‘horizons once beyond my imagining.’