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.)

AFTER HUNKERING down for several hours in a rank plywood shack at Camp Muir, we started our bid for the summit at 1 a.m. on September 19. Forty minutes into our ascent, just over the Cathedral Gap, we started losing bodies. To cross the first glacier a month earlier took all of 15 minutes. Now, a week before RMI closed its guiding service for the winter, the ice was ripped by crevasses, and we had to zigzag to avoid the fault lines. Not that those 40 minutes were without their pleasures: the stars, the tracer light of headlamps reflecting like will-o'-the-wisps in the blue night air, the eerie walls of rock jutting up all around us, that haunting, hollow echo of rock on rock as slivers fell away and landed on the scree below. It was sublime. But the fierce winds had returned, and good luck staying warm.

As our trip confirmed, in business, as in climbing, risk is overrated. "You don't have to be reckless to prove you're a risk taker," Dempsey said.

Despite summiting Rainier in 1996, or maybe because of it, Steven Gatoff was the first to announce he couldn't go on. Susan Luria, the marketing director--suffering, it emerged, from a stress fracture in her left foot--was the next to drop out. "Turning back, although difficult, is sometimes the right course of action," she later e-mailed, connecting the lesson with the manner in which she eventually managed the demise of her dotcom. "The right decision was to stop and not burn through anyone else's money because it wasn't going to get us where we needed to be."

At the next rest stop, on the bone-chilling, windswept Ingraham Flats, we lost half of the remaining members of Team D, among them Dempsey. The rest of us shuffled along for ten more minutes until Rice and Rausch called off the ascent altogether. Before us yawned a several-hundred-foot funnel of ice, the face of which was graced with only a thin ledge to walk across. We were at roughly 12,500 feet, 2,000 feet short of the top. Later, we learned the winds at the summit that day had been clocked at 100 mph.

IN THE MONTHS following our failed summit bid, I called Neal Dempsey to see what had come of his improvised high- altitude schmoozefest. A few things had.

In December 2000, Dino Vendetti was offered a position at Bay Partners, which he accepted. Steven Gatoff, meanwhile, set up several meetings at Morgan Stanley for Dempsey and the others at Bay Partners in order to consider some joint investments. In May 2001, our lead RMI guide, John Race, aided by $1,200 from Team Dempsey, flew to Nepal to join the search for the body and effects of Sandy Irvine, George Mallory's partner on Everest in 1924. (They turned up little.) And in March 2001, displaying a flair for extreme-sports metaphor that might worry their colleagues back at the office, Gatoff, Luria, and Marcy Keenan, who'd only met for the first time on Rainier, went dog mushing together for a week in Alaska.

For his part, Dempsey said his latest experience on Rainier only reinforced what he's learned about risk, whether in the mountains or the markets. "You know, when I was on McKinley [in 1992], we got weathered in for three days by one storm at 17,000," he told me. "And there were three Korean climbers who were there alongside us, without guides and stuff they really should have had with them. In the middle of the night, they took off. They had to get to the summit, because they had to catch the 6:08 out of Anchorage seven days later. Well, they died trying to go to the top. That was an absolute lesson in real time." In business, as in climbing, risk is overrated, Dempsey said. Sure, you have to take a risk to do anything of distinction. But "you don't have to be reckless to prove you're a risk taker."

Honing your decision-making skills and discovering whom you trust when you're in a fix are just two of the upsides of heading into the mountains with your business group. And it's these kinds of lessons, says Peter Mayfield, a founder of one of the first rock-climbing gyms in the United States who has led climbing clinics for corporate clients like Sun Microsystems and Disney, that will keep driving the adventure-training trend despite the softening economy.In fact, Mayfield plans to relaunch a corporate-focused program this fall in Yosemite. "These things have gotten much more effective over the years," he says. NOLS and BOSS, who only started their "professional development" divisions in the last two years, are betting he's right. Indeed, BOSS has gone so far as to contract Richard Hatch, the first Survivor winner, as a "corporate facilitator."

"You know," Mayfield laughs, "there is one downside you have to look out for. A few times we had people come out to the Sierras who were so moved by their experience, the next thing they did was go into work only to quit their jobs."

I know what he means. Making our way across the Emmons Glacier on the morning of our summit attempt, the sun slowly tore open the sky, painting the spires of Little Tahoma peak and the walls of the crater to our left a luminescent pink. It was the kind of sunrise that burns into your memory, a Technicolor burst that helps you make it through the drudgery of every other gray day. I looked at that and thought, "That's it. I quit."

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