A Lofty Take on Leadership: Mountain Climbing and Managing Companies

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People climb mountains to conquer them. Sometimes, though, they find that the mountains end up exerting an influence over them of a kind they had never anticipated. This influence has nothing to do with glamour and achievement and everything to do with humility and humanity.

Wharton management professor Michael Useem, director of Wharton's Center for Leadership and Change Management, and the business people who accompanied him to the Himalayas on "leadership treks" have used the mountains to learn about the qualities it takes to oversee both expeditions and companies. In turn, they have been deeply moved by the graciousness of the residents who live near the roof of the world. Useem has just published a book using experiences in mountain climbing to describe how business leaders reach their summits. He and others also have been involved in an effort to give something back to the young people of Nepal by raising money to build a dormitory for students.

"I had my first taste of mountains at age 15," says Useem. "I was in Kashmir, India, on a family visit. I hiked to 12,000 feet. Coming from lower Michigan, which is totally flat, and then seeing this earth with such vertical dimensions, the lure of the mountains became irresistible. I have done a lot of rock and mountain climbing in the years since, but it was not until 1998 that I began to use mountaineering as a way to analyze management and leadership skills. That was when I made the first Wharton Leadership Trek to Mount Everest. The book is an outgrowth of that thinking.

In Upward Bound: Nine Original Accounts of How Business Leaders Reached Their Summits, the Wharton researcher and two co-editors -- his son Jerry Useem, a senior writer at Fortune, and venture capitalist Paul Asel - have collected stories written by executives who relate their experiences as climbers to the challenges and hazards of business.

Michael Useem sees strong, practical parallels between what it takes to lead an expedition and manage business organizations. "The book draws on mountaineering and rock climbing as a metaphor for management. It especially focuses on leadership decisions -- what it means to be the leader of a climbing expedition and how that bears on what it means to be a company leader."

Useem got the idea for the book a couple of summers ago when he was climbing Mount Adams, a peak not far from Mount Rainier in Washington state, with one of his daughters, Susan Useem, and Paul Asel.

"It was a three-day climb. We were at a high campsite, a spectacular setting. We were musing on how our own experience and the experiences of people like Edmund Hillary, Tenzing Norgay and others had so many implications for how you should think about management." Hillary, the New Zealand explorer, and Tenzing, a Sherpa climber, in 1953 became the first climbers to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

One of the book's chapters is written by Jim Collins, the author of the bestsellers Built to Last and Good to Great, and an experienced rock climber who started scaling mountains when he was a teen-ager.

Collins describes how people seeking to achieve a goal should focus on what he calls "fallure," not on failure. Fallure is a bit of wordplay derived from a decision that rock climbers make if they know they cannot complete the route they have chosen for a climb. They allow themselves to fall, knowing that the bolts attached to the side of the rock face through which their climbing ropes are threaded will break their fall. In fallure, a climber still fails to get up the route, but he or she pushes to the ultimate limit. Fallure means a climber made a commitment to make the ascent, despite the odds.

"What Jim is saying is you want to push as high and as aggressively as you can, and even if you fall off, that's okay," Useem says. It's like "the start-up entrepreneur who wants to be aggressive, who should be aggressive, and if he or she is too timid they won't get to the place where they ultimately can be enormously successful. But to do that, you have to face the possibility you may indeed fall off. In rock climbing, as in business, you've got to be able to take managed risks to build a company."

Another chapter was written by Stacy Allison, owner of a contracting company that renovates old homes and the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Allison recounts the ramifications of a critical decision made by fellow climber Scott Fischer during an earlier expedition up Everest. Fischer, co-owner of a guide service, had been the leader of the expedition from the start. But he later announced that while he would retain the position of leader for official purposes during the journey to base camp, he did not want to make decisions for the group once everyone was on the mountain. He declared that everyone would share in leadership duties.

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