Mountain management

We've heard accounts from the climbers. But what's it like for the guide?

Robert Anderson, 44, is a creative director at Foote Cone Belding in New York, where his team creates online advertising for such clients as J.P. Morgan Chase and Hewlett-Packard. As a professional mountain guide with Britain's Jagged Globe Expeditions and a veteran of Mount Everest, he leads teams of executives to the tops of the world's tallest mountains--including the 8,000-meter Himalayan giant Cho Oyu. What motivates Anderson? The executives he guides? This is his perspective.

FORBES GLOBAL: When guiding a big climb, what's most critical to look for?

People who are successful in business have choices. They could be golfing or sailing around the world with their families. Knowing the real motivation behind why someone chooses to go off for a month or more--to a place where there are no showers, the high temperature for the day is minus 20 degrees Celsius and getting up at four a.m. is common--is the most important thing to understand.

Many executives want something far different from their business experiences, which they feel they've lived to the point of boredom. They seek a huge challenge in a new environment where success and failure depends upon their own performance. When life and death decisions need to be made quickly, the right one provides a feeling of power that no business challenge can. So, as a guide, I want to learn what someone's specific climbing motivation is. People motivated by a personal desire to stretch their limits are ideal. People who just need to prove themselves are dangerous.

The second thing I seek is balance across physical, mental and spiritual areas. The importance of being physically fit is obvious but often overrated. At high altitudes, the moral of the tortoise and the hare is played out frequently. A person's connection to the earth and how he moves over it are more important than actual physical strength. I can watch someone walk across a parking lot and tell how he will perform in the mountains by his cadence and the way he steps off a curb. Up high, putting on a pair of double plastic boots takes some people 30 minutes. It really is that hard. I've seen clients proudly complete the task and stand up, only to realize that they had tied their boots together. At the same time, I don't want people to get in so deep that they can't keep perspective. I climbed with an Olympic athlete wound so tightly that he couldn't sleep: He was constantly "psyching up." He reached 7,500 meters but had worn himself down mentally and had to descend just as we went for the top.

The most difficult balance to understand quickly is spiritual. I don't mean religion; I mean the faith people have in themselves to accomplish something that physically seems impossible and mentally seems too painful, when the ultimate realization of the goal requires a leap of faith. On an 8,000-meter peak, anyone is going to feel physically and mentally so lousy that if you examine yourself rationally you'll just turn around. Reaching the summit requires transcending the rational. This is where an executive gets his biggest reward, through gaining and expanding on an internal belief.

Any examples of how executives apply boardroom skills to the mountain?

Mentally, executives who climb peaks are highly acute and quick learners, assimilating knowledge almost by osmosis. And though some might be dominating in their own environment, I find them good listeners, accustomed to taking in information quickly and acting upon it. I had two executives on an expedition with very different business styles. One was hard-charging, accustomed to dominating the decision-making process. Physically, though, he wasn't very strong. The second was an Englishman, one used to rallying a team around him. Physically, he was much stronger. I teamed them up on a rope with me so that the mentally driven but physically inferior man would be encouraged--or maybe he just refused to be beaten--by the physically stronger man. And the other man now had someone who was struggling to keep up, so it helped to motivate him to keep moving. Where there was deep snow, the stronger went out front to break the trail. In the morning, when it is very hard to get moving, the more driven personality came to the fore, pushing for an an early start by rousing climbers out of their sleeping bags so that his slower speed didn't keep them from reaching the next camp on time.

You're an executive yourself. Compare that with guiding.

Sitting in a tent at 8,000 meters in the Himalayas with a blizzard raging and sitting at a desk in New York are physically and geographically as far apart as you can get. The penalties for a mistake in climbing are absolute, which hones the decision-making process as nothing else will. Business decisions tend to have a lot less simplicity and aren't life-and-death. But success in both fields requires vision, empathy, courage--and a dose of reality. Whether crafting a route up a mountain or crafting communication in an ad agency, many of the same human disciplines are brought into play: the joy of setting out on a journey, of trying alternatives, of formulating a plan and persevering, of examining results to see what can be improved next time. The joy I find in an expedition--which I think many of my clients who have been successful in business find--is filled with absolutes. You go to climb a mountain. Your decisions can get you to the top, make you go down or kill you. A month or so later you are home, journey complete. You've lived a whole life condensed into a very defined time frame, with a final outcome.

It's said that a guide is a cook, motivator, doctor, athlete, logistics manager. Explain.

Guiding is like running a business: dealing with a myriad of logistics, with the mountain looming and the specialized skills required to climb it thrown in. In the initial stages of an expedition, a guide's business skills are far more useful than his climbing skills. An expedition with 15 members can have more than 100 people involved--from a booking company in the West to cooks in the East--and each has to do a thorough job or an expedition can be ruined. The old adage "A chain is only as strong as its weakest link" certainly applies on big mountains.

How do clients react when they must turn around short of the top?

I've rarely had to ask a client to descend early. I do everything within the bounds of safety to get them as high as they can go. And if there is a decision to go down, it is their own. I did have a client once who insisted that he could climb higher, despite his inability to keep up with the team. This client never wanted to help himself. He insisted that he had climbed Aconcagua with the same slow step-by-step strategy.

It worries me when people compare mountains, since each is unique. With Aconcagua--the route being nearly all rock--similarities to a snow-covered Himalayan 8,000-meter peak are minimal. It was obvious that my client was endangering not only himself but also the rest of us, so I had to order him down. Of the things he needed to be thinking about he was failing on every one. The weather was moving faster than he could descend, he was unstable on the ice, and he wasn't cognizant enough of his shortcomings to counteract his weaknesses.

An 8,000-meter peak is very different from, say, Kilimanjaro, right?

Yes. On the biggest peaks, clients must be far more self-reliant. The failure to do so has been borne out repeatedly on Everest, with disastrous consequences. While a guide may be unable to provide much physical assistance up that high, his decision-making ability is extremely valuable. When I started guiding in the Himalayas, I quickly realized that people needed to think more for themselves. I developed a graphic which corresponded to the sky, the earth, your team and yourself. I teach everyone to work through what is changing in each of these areas so that they are aware of what may be dangerous.

At high altitudes, if you're only reacting to circumstances, you're behind. Only by thinking ahead is there any degree of safety. The good thing is that executives in today's volatile business climate understand this implicitly. And, closer to home, online advertising has had its own share of crevasses for me to negotiate as well.

James M. Clash, who also covers mutual funds for Forbes, is a mountain climber and fellow of the Explorers Club.