Networking on the Rope to Success (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine August 2001

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Networking on the Rope to Success (Cont.)

IT'S NOT HARD to appreciate Gatoff's apprehension. Though the rhetoric is cooling off somewhat now that the Nasdaq has come down to earth, over the last few years journalists and bizspeak gurus served up astonishing quantities of overheated blather about the New Economy, the New Rules, and the notion that business had become a radical adventure for those willing to keep up with the velocity of change. For a few months there, it really did seem like we'd all soon be living in a PowerPoint Nation, where every field of human endeavor and significant historical figure would get co-opted as an object lesson for ambitious middle-managers--from God's only son (Laurie Beth Jones's Jesus CEO) to the Bard (Norman Augustine and Kenneth Adelman's Shakespeare in Charge) to jazz pianist Dave Brubeck (John Kao's Jamming). Not surprisingly, mountaineers, endurance athletes, and explorers were next.

"What I do is only seemingly more dangerous than what a dedicated business manager does," asserts the Tyrolean alpinist Reinhold Messner in his latest book, Moving Mountains: Lessons on Life and Leadership. "A business person accepts risk in his or her sphere. Risk is the resistance which we detect, assume, wish to master." A solo climb of Pakistan's Nanga Parbat and a run up the Big Board at the NYSE: Same difference!

Last year saw a logjam of guides to business excellence modeled on extreme antics. Maryann Karinch's Lessons from the Edge is filled with anecdotes about stunt sky divers and her rivals in the inaugural Eco-Challenge in 1995, but like Messner's tome, it's a bit of a miscellany. Her theme: The crazier the gig, the more crucial the preparation. Pat Williams, senior veep for the Orlando Magic, recently divulged his business wizardry in the tantalizingly titled Secrets from the Mountain, based on a climb of...Mount Rainier. Unfortunately for those trudging the road to corporate enlightenment, his insights couldn't be more trite, i.e. "Be a Winner and Join the Team." And then there's all the grist that's been made of Ernest Shackleton's big blunder down under (including the books Shackleton's Way: Leadership Lessons from the Great Antarctic Explorer and Leading at the Edge: Leadership Lessons from the Extraordinary Saga of Shackleton's Antarctic Expedition). Not everyone on the Dempsey Summit Team (stitched on commemorative baseball caps) was sure this was such a good idea.

"I find it very interesting that Shackleton has taken on almost this heroic, cult- figure status in the business community," Gatoff said. "People point to this guy as a great role model when in fact he basically failed miserably, and didn't come anywhere close to reaching his goal."

Dennis N. T. Perkins, one of the authors of Leading at the Edge, has heard such criticism before. "I don't contend that the leadership Shackleton demonstrated to see his crew to safety is enough for all aspects of business," he told me. "You also have to have good strategic planning and a business model that works."

With the tale of the Endurance, the TV show Survivor, and films like Cast Away driving interest, the trend toward extreme outdoor experiences tailored to "professional development" has taken off in the last few years. New Yorkheadquartered Outward Bound was a pioneer when it first took suits into the woods for a little teamwork back in the 1970s. Today there are approximately 15,000 "adventure programs" in the United States, and the ones focused on business groups compete for between $100 million and $250 million annually, according to Bill Proudman, founder of the Inclusivity Consulting Group, a management-training company in Portland, Oregon. Those programs run the gamut from ropes courses conducted at the local Boy Scout summer camp to guide services like 33-year-old RMI and on through wilderness-survival programs such as Wyoming's National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), and Colorado's Boulder Outdoor Survival School (BOSS)--not to mention outfitters like Texas-based spECOps, a six-year-old tour operator staffed by former and reserve Green Beret medics that recently took a billionaires club to the Costa Rican jungle for some improvised X Games.

The way "corporate enhancement" or "executive leadership" programs are supposed to work is straightforward enough. As Confucius had it, "I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand." What most companies want their employees to understand is that they're working toward a common goal. That goal is usually as mundane as opening up lines of communication between two divisions (the marketing department, say, and the engineers) or trying to "change the culture" by encouraging a department that's lapsed into a pass-the-buck malaise to pick up that buck.

"The impetus for these trips isn't really so different from those designed for recidivist youth," notes Jaci Dvorák, co-owner, with her husband, of Bill Dvorák's Kayaking & Rafting Expeditions, in Nathrop, Colorado, whose clients have included the Bayer Corporation, Boston Beer, and a number of medical suppliers. "You just change the language and it's really the same," she teases. "A lot of these business types are recidivous, too."

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