AN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR at Harvard from 2000 to 2006, Roberto turned to Everest in 2002, having already written case studies about subjects like winemaker Robert Mondavi and the Kennedy administration. To produce his Himalayan brief—whose short and sweet title is Mount Everest: 1996—Roberto culled news reports, compared Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air with Anatoli Boukreev's The Climb, and sought out expert opinions from David Breashears, the adventure filmmaker who was on the mountain in '96, shooting footage for the Imax film Everest.

Breashears, who is currently working on a new documentary about the '96 events (slated for release this fall), has an office across the street from the Harvard Business School. Roberto cold-called him in 2002 and asked him to speak to one of his classes.

"He does a marvelous job," says Breashears, who isn't bothered that Roberto has no experience in climbing. "Mike never tells his students why. He uses the Socratic method and asks them to tell him why."

In an introductory 21-page document, complete with maps, graphs, and endnotes, Roberto summarizes the Everest story and introduces the main players. He relies heavily on Krakauer's version of events, and his conclusions (which he expanded on in a journal article) are similar: Bad decisions—possibly driven by guides' desires to get paying clients to the top and exacerbated by altitude sickness, unexpected weather, and tough luck—led to calamity.

Roberto's main positive lesson from all this is that good teamwork and meticulous decision making can, in theory, offset the natural shortcomings of individuals. To demonstrate what he means, his talks center on the actions of guides Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, the owners, respectively, of Adventure Consultants and Mountain Madness. As every student of the tale knows, these two men were attempting to lead a total of 14 clients to the summit on the same day, and both ended up tarrying too long at the top. When an afternoon blizzard rolled in, both Fischer and Hall—along with two of Hall's clients and one of his guides—ended up dead.

Roberto believes one of the fatal flaws on Everest was poor communication that blocked the flow of criticism. Like many lead guides, he says, Hall established himself as the absolute ruler, ostensibly to protect his inexperienced clients. The unexpected result, however, was that Hall's clients—and even his fellow guides—didn't speak up about problems.

This attitude turned out to be deadly, Roberto says, because when Hall failed to adhere to a strict turnaround time on summit day—a fixed hour when everyone was supposed to start descending, whether they'd summited or not—his team was ill equipped to make decisions on the fly. "Rules alone are not good safeguards," Roberto told me during one conversation. "Groups must be able to hash out risks, because you cannot predetermine risk. Recalibrating is very important."

On the group level, Roberto argues that the expeditions were teams in name only and that both groups displayed an absence of "learning behaviors," such as the ability to discuss mistakes, exchange information, and challenge prevailing views. Roberto emphasizes that "the strength of teams is that they can minimize cognitive biases by maximizing" these beneficial behaviors. Effective leaders, he says, inspire people to work together by implementing methods for "deciding how to decide."