News

High Altitude Leadership

By Chris Warner and Don Schmincke, Jossey-Bass, 210 pages, $30.95

It's known as the death zone: The top altitude of the planet's tallest mountains, above 26,000 feet, where survival for a long time is impossible because of the lack of oxygen. Make a mistake, and it's fatal.

Chris Warner and Don Schmincke believe that by studying leadership in the death zone we'll be better leaders in our organizations, helping our teams to overcome obstacles and climb to the highest altitudes.

"In achieving peak performance as a high-altitude leader, you also risk death. It could be the death of a career, project, team or company, or in extreme situations, someone's physical death. Learning the best way to succeed comes from studying the death zone," they write in High Altitude Leadership.

Mr. Warner is an avid mountain climber, having led more than 150 international expeditions, and an entrepreneur, having founded Earth Treks, a U.S. chain of indoor climbing centres. Mr. Schmincke is a scientist and engineer who turned into a provocative management consultant after he discovered that most management theories fail to work. While researching what did work, he took part on a mountaineering expedition, a fundraiser for breast cancer research sponsored by Earth Treks. The result was the blend of mountaineering lore and management advice in this book.

"When you are in the death zone, you can't grab a book to look for new theories, you can't dial a consultant, and motivational speakers are finally short of breath. Up here, the best teams emulate behaviours seen only in the highest performing organizations — and the worst teams wallow in their dysfunctions," the authors warn.

Mountaineers face eight dangers in the death zone. And in organizations, the authors stress, high altitude leaders face the same eight dangers.

Fear of Death

Traditional business education occurs safely in classrooms. But in tough situations, we tend to feel fear, and freeze up. To get past that, you must embrace death, and act. That means facing up to — rather than avoiding or denying — the possible flop of a project, a sale, or a career. "High altitude leaders find these moments of imminent failure free them to take decisive action. The call to action from accepting such business deaths drives problem solving, decision making, and execution with greater clarity of vision," they observe. Suddenly a host of new possibilities exist, including ones you would have dismissed earlier.

Selfishness

Mr. Warner tells harrowing tales of selfishness on the mountains, where the zest to reach the summit leads some climbers to fail to help others, resulting in injury or death. But selfishness causes problems at work — from turf wars to the downfall of businesses. To surmount selfishness, you must develop a compelling human saga — a story about what your people should strive for that will ignite passions and bring them together.

Tool Seduction

In mountaineering, an overdependence on the Sherpas, tools and infrastructure can limit talented climbers. Similarly, a parade of consultants with their latest theories, templates and other tools can bog down companies. We need tools — but good ones, not fads. Adapt tools to your company — not your company to the tools.

Arrogance

Having too high an opinion of your abilities on a mountain can kill you, as Mr. Warner has seen on various expeditions, and felt personally on Nepal's Ama Dablam peak, when his team miscalculated the time the climb would take and he was lucky the frostbite on nine of his fingers didn't lead him to lose them. Arrogance — notably arrogant leaders — threatens companies. The antidote, on mountains or in boardrooms, is a dose of humility. Hire better, cultivate inner awareness, and identify and coach your arrogant leaders.

Lone heroism

Lone heroes make for great cinema, but on mountaintops they can interfere with the climbing plans of others and wreck expeditions. Similarly in organizations, they can create divisions and derail plans, which is why, the authors write, the U.S. military trains troops in a team approach called "no heroes." To avoid the danger of lone heroism, you must create partnership.

Cowardice

Does anyone in your company boast about his heroic deed when in reality he wasn't even close to the action? Do doomed projects move along because nobody dares reveal the truth? Do staff members talk behind their manager's back because they are afraid to tell her the truth? Has cowardly politics superseded performance? Just as cowards go into battle because they are too ashamed to turn and run in front of their peers, you have to create a culture in which individuals are willing to speak the truth because it is shameful not to.

Comfort

When the journey gets too painful, there is a temptation to turn around rather than stretch for the summit of your ambitions. And comfort is often accompanied in workplaces by an evil offspring: politeness. "But politeness eats truth. And lack of truth eats profits," they write. When the going gets tough, persevere rather than succumbing to comfort.

Gravity

Travelling on a glacier one day with a colleague, as advance scouts for their team, Mr. Warner watched his friend take a step and suddenly disappear — into a crevice. Fortunately, they were tied together, and Mr. Warner was able to rescue him; ironically, thanks to gravity as he fell into another crevice rather than being pulled over with the friend with both plunging to their deaths. Gravity happens in business as well — just look at the stock markets these days, and the lineup of once-flourishing companies seeking bailouts. As Mr. Warner and his tethered climber were saved by luck, you will need some luck in business. It may be skill-based, in which case you are making your own luck, or it may be pure luck.

The best parts of this book, by far, are the mountain-climbing stories, taken from Mr. Warner's experiences. They powerfully illustrate what works and what doesn't work when human beings come together in a death zone. The transference to business is uneven — sometimes the analogy doesn't quite work, or the survival tips are limp — but, over all, the ideas are useful to get you thinking about leadership in the workplace, and they are packaged with some memorable stories from high altitude leadership on our tallest mountains.

In addition: It's a quickie book by 12 authors, so some unevenness and repetition is to be expected in The Finance Crisis And Rescue (University of Toronto Press, 166 pages, $24.95) by a group of academics from the Rotman School of Management. But if you're looking for a quick, deeper explanation of what is happening in the economy than the general media is providing, this book could be to your liking. John Hull, a risk management expert, has a fine explanation of the derivatives at the epicentre of the crisis. If you want encouragement, business economics professor Peter Dungan has an optimistic view of the real economy in the months ahead. Finance professor Eric Kirzner's contribution on what value investors can learn from the crisis is also noteworthy. At times, the book plunges a bit too far into jargon, but it's a timely transfer of knowledge from academe to the general public.

Just In: Joel Makower, executive editor of GreenBiz.com, helps prepare for the new world of business in Strategies for the Green Economy (McGraw-Hill, 290 pages, $30.95).

Greentailing and Other Revolutions in Retail (John Wiley, 241 pages, $32.95) by consultants Neil Stern and Willard Ander explains the strategies that leading retailers and suppliers are using to connect with eco-conscious consumers.

The Plot to Save the Planet (Crown, 279 pages, $30) by Brian Dumaine, editorial director of Fortune Small Business, shows how visionary entrepreneurs and corporate titans are creating solutions to global warming.

Special to The Globe and Mail