by Pawel Motyl
On Everest, then, there were two typical workgroups whose members were only just getting to know one another. These groups, unfortunately, were treated right from the start by their leaders as if they were teams, which later resulted in numerous negative consequences.
If we look at the merging of the two expeditions from a business perspective (after all, they were commercial undertakings), we get a great manual on what not to do.
First, the joining of the two differently managed groups took place at a brief meeting in a tent at base camp, where the participants were simply informed that the leaders had decided to integrate the two teams for safety purposes. The intention was to gain greater control over a challenging situation (remember, there were many climbers on Everest at the time). Alas, that was where the integration ended. No new leader of the combined group was appointed. Why? Hall, as the more experienced commercial operator, couldn’t possibly imagine a situation in which he would cede authority to Fischer; in turn, Fischer, who had ambitions to catch up with Hall’s achievements, had no intention of backing down. The lack of clear leadership led to inconsistent rules of operation. For example, Rob Hall’s expedition had a precisely established turnaround time, whereas Scott Fischer’s didn’t.
The merging of the two teams wasn’t a merger in any real sense of the term. Two discrete workgroups became one in a chaotic environment of where unclear principles of operation reigned.
This brings us to the question of the design, alignment, and communication of the guides’ roles. An RCA shows that a curious, yet understandable mistake was made in relation to the roles and responsibilities of the guides who had been hired.
The professional climbers employed by each of the two teams had very different levels of experience. Boukreev was one of the best in the business. He was renowned for his ascent of Kang-chenjunga (28,170 feet) by a new route and in Alpine style (without Sherpas or supplemental oxygen). He had climbed Mount Everest twice and stood on the tops of Makalu, Manaslu, and Dhaulagiri. On Dhaulagiri, he not only climbed a new route, but also set a record for the fastest ascent. In 1993, he added a true diamond to his collection: K2. His partner, Neal Beidleman, had no such achievements in his résumé, and counted only Makalu among his eight-thousanders. Furthermore, Fischer had offered him far less pay, which meant Beidleman classified himself as the number three in the team, taking orders not only from the leader, but also from Boukreev. There was a similar discrepancy in experience in Hall’s team. Michael Groom had, by 1996, built a solid reputation as a climber, being the fourth person in the world to conquer the four highest peaks on Earth without oxygen: Everest, K2, Kangchenjunga, and Lhotse, adding Makalu in 1999. Andy Harris’s experience was much less extensive.
Despite these differences, all the guides were excellent sports climbers. Importantly, though, they had little prior experience in the world of commercial expeditions. They had never previously filled the roles that Hall and Fischer expected them to, and Hall and Fischer did virtually nothing to teach them their roles. The situation can be summed up by Anatoli Boukreev, who didn’t climb with oxygen on principle, refusing his boss’s instruction to take bottles on the summit assault and not understanding that it wasn’t about him but the safety of the clients. Fischer, too, made a fundamental mistake by agreeing that Boukreev could leave the bottles at the camp.
And this brings us to another “why?” Why did Scott Fischer, as leader of the group, allow his subordinate, whom he was paying $25,000, to ignore his instruction? Why did he let Boukreev do what he wanted? There were two reasons. First, I’m not convinced that Boukreev saw the somewhat less experienced Fischer as his actual leader. If I’m right about this, I wonder if he therefore didn’t take the American’s rules seriously, didn’t regard them as something a man of his experience needed to heed. It’s worth recalling that Boukreev repeatedly emphasized that, in his opinion, the clients should be as independent as possible and were responsible for their own safety. The second, less immediately obvious reason can be traced not only to Scott Fischer, but also, although indirectly, to the other professional climbers.
One of the most startling phenomena in the business world is the deeply held conviction that a renowned specialist in a field is automatically the best candidate for a manager. Think about it. Who is typically chosen as the new regional manager from among twenty sales reps? In the vast majority of cases, it’s the people with the best sales figures. Unfortunately, as numerous studies and business practice shows, this is shooting yourself in both feet. The traits of a true expert have little in common with those of a manager or leader. In one fell swoop, you lose a brilliant salesperson and probably don’t acquire a great manager.
I learned this lesson myself a few years ago. I employed a very young, but unbelievably talented guy, a typical Millennial (we even called him Neo). Neo was a top expert in social media, moving through the medium even better than a fish through water. At the age of twenty-five, he had more important social media campaigns under his belt than most people of my generation will manage during their next twelve incarnations. Neo brought a lot to the company, not only creating a comprehensive strategy for our social media presence, but also successfully implementing it.
You’re probably picturing Neo right now as a long-haired, skinny geek, wearing a threadbare jumper covered in stains, chained to the computer monitor, and barely visible behind a massive pile of empty pizza boxes.
Well, you’d be wrong. Neo is a snappy dresser, genuinely well read, and with wide-ranging interests beyond the virtual world. In the real world he communicates just as clearly and interestingly as he does via the Internet. Admittedly, I don’t know if he’s partial to the occasional pizza, but even if he is, I suspect the empty boxes are regularly cleared from his work station.
My mistake lay in assuming that because Neo not only excelled in the use of new technology but also, in stark contrast to the majority of keyboard wizards I’ve encountered, possessed effective interpersonal skills, he would be the ideal person to manage the digital marketing team (a management function with four subordinate positions).
I know I’ve done this before, but bear with me: “Twelve months later.”
The history of those twelve months can be summed up as a succession of increasingly frustrating errors and outright catastrophes. Despite his outstanding abilities, Neo never got to grips with the role of manager; instead, he did most of the work himself and didn’t engage with his team, whom he couldn’t motivate enough, thanks to his assumption that they were all as motivated as he was. He also coped poorly with tricky situations—for example, if there was conflict in the group, Neo wouldn’t intervene, assuming things would sort themselves out. What was worse, although he learned from these failures, he wasn’t able to put those lessons into practice and change anything. His nature was stronger than his will and, even if he knew that he shouldn’t do everything himself and that micromanaging was a bad idea, ultimately his expert tendencies took over and he went back to his old ways. The only good news is that I managed to retain Neo in the business, despite his misadventures as a manager. He’s proven to be something of a phoenix, and is currently flourishing in a role that is ideally suited to his skills and personality. He is progressing along a path typical for specialists, because we both faced facts and openly acknowledged that management was not his forte.
Let’s return to 1996 and the hostile slopes of Mount Everest to look at the leaders of the two expeditions, as well as the decisions they made. Both Scott Fischer and Rob Hall were very experienced climbers who had been in the Death Zone on several occasions and had learned first-hand about the effects of high altitudes on the human body, as well as its impact on a person’s ability to assess situations and make rational decisions. Rob Hall also had a lot of experience in leading amateurs, the majority of whom had never been above 26,000 feet before, in such environments.
Both leaders adopted very discrete styles of managing their t
eams. Rob Hall behaved as he had on his earlier expeditions. Strict, authoritative, imposing his opinion on others, and—while climbing—tolerating no dissent in the ranks. As he said, he was always ready to explain the reasons for a particular decision, but only back at the camp, and not halfway up an eight-thousander. He set up numerous detailed procedures and rules for the clients to observe. Those joining his expedition accepted them because they were designed to protect their safety and ensured that the key decisions were taken by a recognized expert.
Scott Fischer saw himself more as a coordinator of the expeditions. Those who knew him say that he believed in improvisation, and that each of his customers had to follow their own rules of the game. Procedures would have restricted that freedom, so he gave his people far greater room to make decisions. He also placed less attention than Hall on the roles and duties of his guides—he treated them more like partners than employees or contractors.
Given the nature of the undertaking, Hall’s approach was appropriate—managing a workgroup in a high-risk situation requires a leader to ensure that clearly defined rules be consistently applied, almost like a benign dictator. The way Fischer led his team can be a great approach for a close-knit, competent, experienced team, but not so much for a group of amateurs who are all focused on their own goals.
And yet, as it turned out later, apart from the two leaders, everyone who died was on Rob Hall’s team: Andy Harris, Yasuko Namba, and Doug Hansen. This was because the New Zealander unwittingly placed his people in a highly dangerous authority trap. Imagine you were on that trip. You’re being led by one of the best climbers in the world running the best commercial operation. He’s a hard man, decisive, and right from the beginning, he drills the idea into you that what the leader says, goes. He imposes a vital rule: at precisely 2:00 pm, you must begin descending, regardless of where you are on the mountain. You’re attacking the summit; 2:00 pm comes around—and the leader keeps climbing. What is a client, caught in an authority trap, supposed to think in this situation? You’ll start rationalizing the leader’s decision, placing faith in his vast experience and expertise in assessing the risks. “He knows what he’s doing,” “The weather must be better than usual, and we’ve got a bit more time,” “We’re clearly a stronger group than the previous ones and the leader knows we can make it back down in time,” “The time limit is probably 4:00 pm and he just told us 2:00 pm to make sure we had time to spare.” And so on.
Why did Hall make such a fundamental and ultimately tragic mistake? Why did he make a decision that destroyed the established and oft-repeated rule of ascent? The answer partly lies in the relationship between Hall and Hansen. Hall, who had sent his clients, including Hansen, back down the mountain just short of the summit in 1995, had to work incredibly hard to persuade his close friend to have another go at climbing Everest. In this way, he created a dangerous version of the sunk costs trap: in an environment of close relationships, he essentially promised (consciously or otherwise) that this time they would succeed, which made it far more difficult to make the right decision at the key moment. Rob Hall, the famous leader of Adventure Consultants, gave into his friend and broke the central principle that he himself had established, and this is what led to the tragic consequences in the hours to come.
Scott Fischer was caught out by the exact same mechanism. One of the members of his expedition was Dale Kruse, a friend of his for many years. When Kruse’s condition deteriorated rapidly as he climbed to Camp III, all while exhibiting the symptoms of high-altitude edema, the leader made the right decision by taking the patient back to base camp. Unfortunately, he decided to take on this task himself instead of delegating, despite the disruption to his acclimatization plan and the enormous effort demanded from him during the assault on the summit. He justified his decision succinctly: “[Kruse] was in tears and I couldn’t send him with anyone else... I didn’t want Anatoly or Neal or one of the Sherpas [to do it]. He’s my friend.”13 It was several hours before an exhausted Fischer finally made it back to camp.
Emotional ties can be a terrible advisor when it comes to making choices. I always feared making decisions most when they affected people I found it hard to remain neutral toward—not only those I particularly liked, but also those for whom I felt some sort of antipathy. Any emotion, positive or negative, renders us subjective when we need to be objective. There’s a reason they say you should never do business with friends, and surgeons shouldn’t operate on family. As the cases of Hall and Fischer show, taking close friends on a high mountain climbing expedition brings an additional substantial risk that needs to be taken into account.
If you look at this analysis in graphic form (overleaf), it’s easy to see the chain of cause and effect, and find the underlying causes of the tragedy. 14
Rule #10
Recognize the value of your failures (and those of others).
Thoroughly analyze your past failures and draw in-depth, objective, and actionable conclusions for the future.
It’s amazing how easily we forget this rule. Obviously, upset by failure, we ask ourselves questions like, “How did that happen?!” but rarely do we manage to put our emotions to one side and examine the real causes of the failure. Our judgment is most probably clouded by anger, disappointment, and frustration. Even if we change something in our behavior, approach, procedures, or processes, we mostly deal with the visible symptoms (whatever upset us), and not the deeper causes of the problem.
For this reason, an RCA, while being a technically simple operation, is difficult emotionally. It involves looking into things we generally prefer not to speak about: the mistakes we made at various stages that led to our making the wrong decision. On top of that, in many modern, dynamically growing companies, I have noticed a trap in the organizational and management culture that makes it harder to initiate an RCA. The imperative of positive thinking is a trap that often leads to our hearing a high-ranking manager say, “Okay, that’s enough crying over spilt milk; let’s focus on the future and fight for success.” Everyone is relieved to hear these words, because who wants to talk about unpleasant matters... ? In business, analyzing failure too often comes down to quickly identifying the “guilty party,” who all too often is merely a scapegoat whose eventual dismissal doesn’t fix the source of the problem.
There’s an old joke about corporations that involves two rowing teams—the Greens and the Blues. There was an annual eights race between the teams for a Very Important Cup awarded by a Very Important Person, and it was certainly a Very Important Event for the two teams who prepared for it in minute detail. Come the day, emotions were running high and the teams’ supporters lined the banks of the river. The two teams took their places and the starting gun was fired. What happened next was an outright disaster for one of the teams. The Greens reached the line ten minutes behind the Blues! The Greens were in uproar—how could this possibly have happened!? They called in consultants from a Very Important Consultancy Company who, after many days of hard work (reflected in the billable hours and the invoices), found the reason for the failure. The eight of the winning Blue team was a cox and seven rowers, while the Greens had seven coxes and a rower. The consultants from the Very Important Consultancy Company pointed out the obvious problem: poor management structure. So, the Greens made the appropriate changes. They decided four coxes were enough and that they should report to two Supercoxes who in turn would be managed by a Cox of All Coxes to create the necessary accountability that was obviously hitherto lacking. They introduced the changes and an entirely new team was entered for the next competition. This time they lost by twenty minutes. The angry Greens management team fired the consultants, checked the results of the regattas once more, and decided to summarily fire the rower, who was clearly the source of the problem.
It’s probably best all round if you don’t ask about the times of the Greens in the ensuing races.
A perfect real-world example of this approach was illustrat
ed in a series of events I witnessed not long ago in a company from the tech sector (let’s call it The GREENS). So, The GREENS, finding itself the leader in its field, was boxing clever to maintain its position against ever smaller, more aggressive rivals. Its strategy was to keep ahead of the competition by rapidly introducing innovations into its range (both in terms of improved products and services, as well as in terms of pricing policy and customer service models). The strategy was effective, and The GREENS organization was frequently presented on the pages of business magazines as a good example of a competitive strategy. Everything went smoothly until one of its new product launches bombed. Not only were sales way below expectations, but the actual product was riddled with faults, which only became apparent after a few weeks of use. The GREENS lost a lot of money introducing modifications and upgrades until—in response to the still poor sales volume—it withdrew the product and started looking for the guilty parties (seriously, those were the precise words—I heard them myself: “guilty parties,” and not “source of the problem”). Of course, there could only be one guilty party: the manager in charge of the team that developed and introduced the product. They decided to fire the manager, and several other employees followed suit soon after.