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.)

ON THE MORNING of day three, we left the Paradise Inn, wound our way up through patches of wildflowers and snowmelt streams, and stepped out onto the Muir snowfield. We were off to Camp Muir, elevation 10,188 feet, but unlike the previous day, today was sheer drear, the sky and sun blotted out. We trudged silently in a frigid soup of cold, as if moving through ice in its gas form. Mountaineering might be a corny metaphor for work, or it might be a splendid one, but this--this was just plain hard work.

"It horrifies me to think of having my coworkers tied to me crawling up Mount Rainier," Ashton e-mailed me later. "For one, there would be a lot of bitching."

The harsh weather underscored how Dempsey, without really trying, had drawn upon some of the methods the consultants and mountain guides swear by for fashioning effective adventure training, including assessing the expectations and conditioning of the team in advance and finding the right mix of personalities. Tellingly, when I asked the members of Team Dempsey if they would make this same climb with the people they worked with every day--meaning those they'd most likely be stuck with on a corporate outing--most said no.

"It horrifies me to think of having my coworkers tied to me crawling up Mount Rainier," Michael Ashton e-mailed me later. "For one, there would be a lot of bitching. And for another, I've seen a couple of these people try to ski, and they have no business anywhere near snow."

"As self-serving/arrogant as it might sound," wrote Gatoff in another e-mail, "people in our profession are of the type that generally work fantastically hard at whatever they do and are accustomed to not only succeeding but to being at the top; that's who you're comfortable having on your rope team, not some knucklehead nine-to-fiver who doesn't understand why someone would need or want to work until 11:00 p.m. to kick ass and get the job done right."

Knowing these very attitudes, the experts insist, is essential to constructing a successful wilderness experience. In a 1997 textbook titled Effective Leadership in Adventure Programming, authors Simon Priest and Michael Gass--each with a Ph.D. and over 25 years of backcountry experience--include a graph to illustrate the importance of matching the right level of challenge to competence. On the y-axis is risk, perceived or real, and on the x-axis is competence, perceived or real. Peak adventure, the optimal outcome, is a diagonal rising straight from the intersection of the two axes toward the upper right. The extremes, on either side, are boredom or disaster.

Of course, not everyone thinks adventure should be so programmatic. "I think what's happened is that people have stared at those motivational posters for so long--you know, the ones with all the mountain climbers and snowboarders and so on--and they've taken them literally, and feel they must have an extreme outdoors experience to get inspired to work," says Thomas Frank, author of the New Economy critique One Market Under God. "And let's face it, to be a manager today, you can't just be a suburban guy who watches birds or goes car camping or other Boy Scoutish things like that. That won't make you effective. That won't be enough for you to lead the revolution."

"I think it's sort of dumb to turn these experiences into something other than what they are," says Kathleen Eisenhardt, an avid backpacker, professor of management at Stanford Business School, and author of Competing on the Edge. "The more structured they are, the less likely they are to attract interesting people. They start to feel less like adventure and more like work."

As it turned out, Dempsey's agenda-free agenda on Rainier put the more structured professional-development programs in stark relief. It also raised questions at the heart of the corporate-adventure biz: Are these trips better served by a more explicit set of motivational goals, or are they best when participants are encouraged to concentrate on the tasks at hand, and otherwise find their own way? And can you really teach leadership?

"I see value in both approaches," says RMI co-owner Peter Whittaker. "During the peak of the summer, I'm a guide, but I'm also managing 150 to 160 people. Something I love, but hardly get the chance to do, is go up on the mountain with 15 or so of us without any structure at all. And you know, the leaders down here may not emerge as leaders up there." Much of the structure in corporate adventure, Whittaker suspects, is there to keep a power structure in place. "People emerge, given the opportunity," he says, adding that he respects CEOs and execs who climb with RMI without trying to control the experience, because "the mountain is a great equalizer."

Edwin Bernbaum, a climber, corporate speaker, and author of Sacred Mountains of the World, takes mountaineering-as-metaphor so seriously that, for each of the last four years, he has helped lead groups of midcareer executives enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business on treks up Chukhung Ri, a 18,191-foot peak in Nepal's Sagarmatha National Park. There, in the shadow of Everest, he leads discussions of the decision-making detailed in Maurice Herzog's Annapurna, Tom Hornbein's Everest: The West Ridge, and Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air. "What went right and what went wrong on May 10, 1996?" Bernbaum asks, for instance. "Did you think more of [Scott] Fischer's team survived the storm because he was a better delegator?"

"Even in Western culture, where we often think of climbing a mountain as a conquest," Bernbaum says, "the most famous climber isn't Edmund Hillary, but Moses. And whether you believe the story or not, the idea there is that you're climbing the mountain in response to a call in order to get something of benefit for others. It's not about goal-setting, but what you bring back from the experience."

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