High Altitude Leadership E-Book

Chris Warner

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Serie: J-B US non-Franchise Leadership
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 305

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2008

Beschreibung

Leadership is often a risky, lonely role possessing nearly unbearable lows and fleeting highs. Despite this emotionally and intellectually draining roller coaster, a handful of leaders deliver stunning results, with great consistency. They push past current leadership trends in order to achieve the most extremely challenging goals. They don't fall prey to the platitudes or cliches we see so often see in leadership theory. Instead, they succeed by recognizing and surviving the dangers that challenge them as they take themselves and their teams to higher levels. These rare individuals are those that Chris Warner and Don Schmincke call High Altitude Leaders. In High Altitude Leadership they show how to become that kind of leader.The authors present a new approach to leadership development, based on ground-breaking scientific research, field-tested under the most brutal conditions on the most difficult summits, and successfully applied in the training of executives, management teams, and entrepreneurs throughout the world.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Praise

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Why Study Death Zone Leadership?

What You Will Learn

For Those Who Aren’t Mountaineers

Danger #1 - FEAR OF DEATH

Great Fear: The Nemesis of Great Leadership

How Do You Tame Your Fear?

How to Die and Take Action

Fear Conquered?

Danger #2 - SELFISHNESS

How Selfishness Hurts Us

How to Implement a Compelling Saga

Danger #3 - TOOL SEDUCTION

Why Tool Seduction Happens

How to Detect Tool Seduction

A fool with a tool is still a fool.

Failure to adapt to changing conditions leads to failure.

Danger #4 - ARROGANCE

The Everest Laboratory

Evidence of an Arrogance Infection

How to Bring Humility to Arrogance

Danger #5 - LONE HEROISM

How Lone Heroes Endanger Organizations

How to Bring Partnership Forward

Danger #6 - COWARDICE

How Cowardice Risks Companies

How to Instill Bravery

Danger #7 - COMFORT

How Comfort Sabotages Your Greatness

Comfort’s Evil Offspring: Politeness

Collateral Damage from Comfort

How to Inspire Perseverance

Danger #8 - GRAVITY

Gravity: The Great Equalizer

Danger #9 - THE JOURNEY BEGINS

Tom’s Story: Survival in Career and Business

Beware the Three Small Mistakes

Keep the Passion Alive

Don’t Conquer the Peak; Conquer Yourself

Resources

Notes

“Chris Warner is living proof that courage and intellect provide a powerful leadership combination. He and Don Schmincke serve as outstanding guides for exploring what it takes to lead an organization into difficult and uncharted terrain. If you’re an executive who searches for the occasional inspirational gut-check, this book is a must for your shelf.”

—David Callahan, executive editor, SmartCEO Magazine

“At last, something new has been written about leadership. The authors skillfully bridge the gulf between what is required of leaders in life-and-death situations scaling the world’s highest peaks and the more mundane, but sometimes no less scary, halls of corporate America.”

—Cathy A. Trower, Ph.D., research director, co-principal investigator, Collaborative On Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE), Harvard University, Graduate School of Education

Copyright © 2009 by Chris Warner and Don Schmincke. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

eISBN : 978-0-470-45048-2

1. Leadership. 2. Success in business. I. Schmincke, Don, 1956- II. Title. HD57.7.W3685 2009 658.4’092—dc22 2008034927

To our wives for encouraging usto explore the highest peaksAnd to our young childrenwho we hope will climb even higher

Preface

We never expected to write a book together. In fact, business leadership didn’t seem to be something we were fated for. Don is a scientist and an engineer, not a management guru. He graduated from MIT and Johns Hopkins University with research ranging from simulating timing systems for the navy’s nuclear missile systems at Draper Laboratories, to studying atmospheric effects on satellite frequencies at the Applied Physics Laboratory, to automating the Harvard/MIT biomedical laboratory (his thesis research published in the Journal of Medical Instrumentation) and helping pioneer fourth-generation medical imaging technology. While at Hopkins, he became fascinated with how humans organize and perform in groups, and even more fascinated by the high failure rates of management consulting and leadership theories trying to help organizations perform better.

Using anthropology and evolutionary genetics, Don discovered that most management theories fail during implementation due to biological factors. He then developed remarkably effective, and controversial, methods for producing exceptional organizational performance. Unearthing the origins of management behavior flies in the face of many modern business theories, but it apparently struck a chord with CEOs worldwide. Today, over seventy-five hundred CEOs have found Don’s biological leadership applications refreshingly irreverent and revolutionary for bottom-line impact in their organizations.

Don founded The SAGA Leadership Institute in 1990 to continue his research and offer corporate training programs where executives discover why popular management theories fail to work and what to do for success. They learn why throwing poetic visions, wordsmithed mission statements, or idealistic value statements at primal, ego-driven turf wars is senseless. Managers also find out why forcing employees to “forget the past” with group hugs and touchy-feely training programs doesn’t reduce backbiting, hidden agendas, and other profit-sapping behaviors for very long. With the myths dispelled, managers are primed to learn what does work—and has for thousands of years.

That is how Don, the engineer and scientist, became an established management consultant renegade, author, and keynote speaker. His work has been published a hundred times in the past eighteen months, seen on CNN, and written about in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and other national media. Today Don is one of the top speakers for the world’s largest CEO membership organization. Every year he flies 200,000 miles to conferences where he is either a keynote speaker, training over seven hundred CEOs in his workshops, or working with clients in every imaginable organization, from the Department of Defense to large and small corporations.

Ironically, Don’s eventual study of management behavior was inadvertent, much like his meeting Chris Warner in the Andes. At that time, Don was searching once again to validate genetic and anthropological leadership methods. His first book, The Code of the Executive, based on ancient Samurai executive training techniques, was already published in ten languages, and he was ready for another project. He had teased ancient secrets out of old manuscripts and discovered insights from several hundred genetic publications, but he wanted yet another new and unique leadership laboratory to learn what really does work. He listened to hundreds of motivational speakers and read as many of the thirty-five thousand business books published annually as he could. But in the end, he found little that was unique or different.

That all changed on a mountaineering expedition in the Andes as part of the Climb for Hope’s fundraiser for breast cancer research at Johns Hopkins. The expedition was sponsored by Earth Treks, Chris’s company. Don had pursued expeditions for years in the Himalayas, Africa, Indonesia, and other remote regions to advance his leadership research, but on this one he met expedition leader Chris Warner. Don recalls it this way:

I really didn’t know much about Chris. I was just extremely concerned about it being five degrees below zero and trying to climb ice at almost twenty thousand feet on an active volcano. You could say I was preoccupied with just staying alive. But I noticed something about Chris and his team. They were tight, focused, and professional. They were also fresh off another expedition which was a leadership development seminar for the Wharton School of Business. I asked Chris how he led teams like this in such extreme environments. He shared with me his experience of high performance teams tackling the world’s most forbidding mountains. He also told me about dysfunctional teams collapsing under the strain of the challenge. The consequences were always dramatic. After hearing him analyze these leadership experiences, I knew I found the laboratory for my next book. It would be on high altitude leadership: leadership insights beyond what had typically been published by studying those who lead teams in the riskiest and most extremely challenging situations encountered in death zone environments. I approached Chris about the idea of doing a book together, and he quickly jumped on it. We both were teaching the same things, but in different classrooms.

Chris’s story is different. He learned to lead the hard way. At age eighteen, he was taking teenagers out of the maximum security prison in New Jersey and leading them on six-month rehabilitative wilderness adventures. After years of banging heads with delinquents, he rehabbed himself by becoming a mountaineering guide and entrepreneur.

In 1990 he started Earth Treks with all the money he could scrape together: a whopping $592. Today Earth Treks operates three of the nation’s largest indoor climbing gyms, a rock and ice climbing school, and an international mountaineering guide service. Chris has led over 150 international mountaineering expeditions and is one of only nine American climbers who have summited the world’s two tallest mountains: Mount Everest and K2.

Earth Treks’ gross revenue has grown 300 percent in the past three years. It now has over 175 employees and serves tens of thousands of customers every year. It is one of the largest companies in a tough niche industry. With all of its peers being privately held corporations, it’s impossible to tell where Earth Treks ranks, but with growth like this, and earnings before interest, depreciation, and amortization above 20 percent, it’s an admirable business to own. All this growth keeps happening even though in 2000, Chris’s employees commandeered his desk and unplugged his phone; they figured he wasn’t using either.

Based on this entrepreneurial success and Chris’s international climbing reputation, Earth Treks was chosen in 2000 to guide leadership development expeditions for the Wharton School of Business. Each year Earth Treks’ guides lead nearly a hundred M.B.A. candidates on mountaineering expeditions to the Andes and Africa. Chris’s unique approach to leadership has led to a number of television projects. He guided the first reality TV show filmed on Mount Everest, hosted a leadership and risk-taking-themed special for the History Channel, and most recently partnered with NBC to produce a film of his successful K2 expedition. Chris was the field producer and expedition leader and, like everyone else on the small team, was a cameraman and climber/actor on this Emmy-nominated project. When Chris is in the country, he shares his tales of high altitude leadership with Fortune 500 companies and business schools as a keynote speaker or part of longer workshops. For more than twenty-five years, Chris has been a student of leadership, a teacher of leadership, and a leader.

Climbing together, we knew there was synergy in our leadership experiences. As we explored ideas, we kept stumbling on the links between validated biological leadership insights and death zone mountaineering experiences. What began as a conversation in a remote mountain hut grew into experiments with groups in the field. We dragged leaders we admired into the conversation. With increasing clarity, we retested and proved the concepts at corporate retreats and when we spoke to business and leadership groups. As the ideas resonated, we felt compelled to share our hard-earned lessons with a bigger audience. The result is in this book you’re holding.

Acknowledgments

From Don:

The work that I do is powerful only if powerful people help me. I’m forever indebted to the staff at The SAGA Leadership Institute. They have evolved to be the strongest team I could ask for. I’m particularly grateful for Eileen Gwin, who took over as managing director, and Umar Hameed, who relieved me of an infinite number of business development tasks so I could pursue much-needed research and publishing opportunities. I also acknowledge Donna Delovich for assuming the challenging role of financial manager at the institute, filling a gap I spent so long creating. Special thanks to Bonnie Greenberg and Ann Ulick for keeping me on the right plane to the right city in the right hotel, among a thousand other details. I’m also grateful to the Institute field staff who so willingly accommodated me on this quest over the years, especially Susan Barrett, Chris Bogden, Charlie Davis, Griff Hall, Darryl McCormick, and Jill Penaloza.