Here’s the take away: If you want to be an effective leader, you don’t always have to be the loudest or most powerful. We can learn so many lessons from this unassuming turtle! While the world often pays the most attention to the person who shouts loudest, there is much to be said for the loyal workers behind the scenes. Little Mack at the bottom of the pile effectively facilitated the creation of a democratic society with equal doses of hard work and humility. With a little coaching, my son realized that sometimes the most important person isn’t the one at the top taking all the credit.

The ultimate hero is Mack, the loyal turtle who accepts his lackluster assignment with grace. As I was reading this story, I noticed how my perceptive 7-year old quickly realized that King Yertle is not the hero in this story despite having naming rights to the book and a catchy rhyming identity. Yertle the Turtle is an excellent allegory of management techniques that fail. Finally, Mack inadvertently tumbles Yertle’s empire with a simple sneeze, causing a chain reaction that brings greedy King Yertle to his ultimate muddy fate. He doesn’t complain but merely reminds the king that life at the bottom is a challenging fate. In this story, the hero is the loyal subject named Mack who humbly resides at the bottom of the pile. His ultimate fate after tumbling down from a collapsing turtle stack is to forever be king of the mud, “for that is all he can see”.

King Yertle is your typical foolish ruler and greedily stacks the turtles too high. Upon deciding to enlarge his territory, Yertle stacks his loyal turtle subjects on top of each other to expand his kingdom exponentially. For those not familiar, this book follows King Yertle who concludes he is the ruler of “all I can see”. Recently, when reading Yertle the Turtle to my 7-year-old son, I had an adult-sized revelation.

King yertle the turtle