The England cricket team has met with both triumph and disaster in the past few years but it has specialised in the latter. After a series of defeats, one recent head coach, seeking inspiration, took to playing a song by the pop group M People to raise the spirits of the dressing room. The song was called "Search for the Hero Inside Yourself".

The search continues. And not just among the cricketing fraternity. Leaders of organisations ask themselves if they have the right stuff to succeed. What will it take to inspire their people? Are employees "holding out for a hero"?

Regular readers will know that this column takes a sceptical view of the heroic school of leadership, as popularised by some business writers and magazines. Leaders should not be virtuoso soloists. They should be plugged in, embedded at the heart rather than at the pinnacle of the organisation.

Still, tales of heroism seem to be particularly seductive for business audiences. We ask, for example, what we can learn from Sir Ernest Shackleton's expeditions to the south pole, or from Sir Edmund Hillary's successful ascent of mount Everest.

Last week I had a chance to assess for myself whether real-life heroism could be translated in a meaningful way to the workplace. No, of course it wasn't me displaying the heroism. I met, in the distinctly unheroic setting of the Financial Times canteen, Pedro Algorta, one of the 16 survivors from the 1972 plane crash in the Andes mountains, the disaster that was dramatised in the film Alive .

To tell the story briefly: on October 13 1972, the Fairchild twin turboprop F-227 carrying 45 Uruguayan passengers on a flight to Chile crashed in the Andes mountains. Twelve people were killed at once and another three died later that night. But for the next 72 days survivors managed to overcome avalanches (one of which, two weeks into their ordeal, killed another eight passengers), freezing conditions (-30ƒC at night), starvation and exhaustion. With no food left, survivors were forced to eat the flesh of some of their dead fellow passengers.

Two members of the group eventually managed, without mountaineering equipment, to cross through into Chile and summon help on December 22, when helicopters were sent to pick up the crash victims. By now 29 of the original 45 passengers were dead.

Unlike some of his fellow survivors, who wrote books and became regulars on the lecture circuit, Mr Algorta had not spoken publicly about his experiences until recently. After surviving the crash he completed a degree in economics in Buenos Aires and in 1982 took an MBA at Stanford graduate school of business in California. He built a successful career in the Argentine beer and wine industries, rising to become chief executive of two separate companies.

It was only when Mr Algorta attended a 25-year reunion at Stanford, and heard a fellow graduate talk about his experience of being in one of the twin towers on September 11 2001, that he realised he wanted to talk about his own amazing escape. This he has now started to do, having recently retired from corporate life to raise cattle on his farm in Uruguay.

Mr Algorta says that any human being would have tried to stay alive in the way he and his fellow passengers did. It was vital to work one day at a time. On the 10th day after the crash, they heard on their still just-functioning radio that the search for survivors had been called off. "Good news," said one of them. "That means we cannot rely on anybody else from now on - we have to get out of this ourselves."

And it was a team effort. It never occurred to anyone to make a break for it on their own. There were no leaders as such. They all pulled together. And, rather like Joe Simpson, the mountaineer of Touching the Void fame, the survivors took practical steps, kept making mistakes but recovered from them and carried on.

So why the silence until now? "I was busy being a chief executive," Mr Algorta told me. Did you ever speak to colleagues about your experiences? No, he said. Did you draw on them consciously? I never thought about it, Mr Algorta maintained.

Which leaves me struggling with a paradox. Of course, those events of October to December 1972 were extraordinary. It must have been a terrifying, shattering experience. It was a privilege to hear about it at first hand.

But even Mr Algorta suggests that, for him personally, these events had no specific impact on his business career. (You may or may not believe this. But it is what he says.) He got on with the life he had been planning to lead before the crash happened. And, while many people around the world will queue up to hear his story, Mr Algorta himself remains disarmingly modest. "I'm not a guru, I'm not a prophet," he told me.

Heroes continue to amaze us, and I doubt we will ever stop trying to learn from them. As we parted Mr Algorta handed me his attractively designed business card. As a logo he has chosen a set of bold quotation marks. But no words appear between them.