Conquering the North Face

by Hap Klopp

  When Lou Whittaker told me that story, we were standing with a group of five people in the Las Vegas Hilton, the setting of the annual ski show. It was March, a few years ago.

  Lou is a natural storyteller, a mountain man as comfortable in Las Vegas as he is in all the story-making places he’s conquered. Lou loves the wild, even the wild of Las Vegas. He loves to laugh, and he loves to tell a story.

  His voice got louder at the beginning. In the middle of the story it dropped down, and then it rose to a crescendo as the helicopter caught air. And unlike a lot of tall people, he didn’t stoop to talk to me. He stood firm and erect, a bottle of beer in his hand and a wry smile on his face. “Whatever it takes,” he concluded with a grin and a booming laugh.

  Afterward I asked him, “But what if it hadn’t worked?”

  “Sometimes,” mused Lou, “you just know.”

  Obstacles will inevitably pop up on the path to fulfilling your passion, and when they do you must, like the Whittakers did, listen to your instinct, your intuition, that little voice deep inside that “just knows.”

  Like all adventures, the adventure of leadership takes faith. Faith in yourself, and faith in anything and anyone that helps you maintain that faith.

  In the adventure of business, as in life, most problems revolve around people, and their solutions demand your heart as much as your head.

  At L. L. Bean, Leon Gorman, company president and the grandson of L. L. Bean, sits in on every product meeting. Gorman has the final say on what is included in the catalog. Much of it depends on market studies and sales records—all compiled professionally. But the final word on what goes in is Gorman’s, and more than once he has ordered an item in, or out, of the book just because he felt it should be that way. He goes with his gut even when the so-called professionals tell him it’s wrong, because he trusts an instinct that sits at the core of the L. L. Bean vision.

  Have you ever been in a corporate boardroom? Most look like carefully crafted works of art, with carved mahogany swirling and angling this way and that—all of it a red-brown ode to power. But look closer, beyond the trappings of wealth, and see if you can find any good reason for such ostentatiousness. Then ask yourself, Where is the product? If it’s not there, the company is in trouble.

  If company leaders don’t take the time to look at their organization’s product, to feel it, to smell it, to taste it if necessary, then those leaders are merely along for the ride. They are enjoying the fruits without sharing the labor. They do not deserve respect, and they do not deserve to be called leaders. Most likely, they lack the feel, the intuition, and the passion necessary to make the right decisions on corporate matters. To be a leader you can’t be a dilettante. You have to immerse yourself and get your hands dirty. It takes incredible determination.

  In Berkeley, California, a company created the Power Bar, a candy-bar-type product specially formulated for athletes to eat before competition. It gave them energy. Standard chocolate bars did the same thing, but the chocolate in those bars could upset the athletes’ stomachs—a disaster in competition.

  The problem was manufacturing without chocolate. The solution was complicated because the machines that made traditional candy bars are lubricated by the chocolate in the bars. If you take the chocolate out, you take away the lubrication.

  The people at Power Bar had to invent their own machinery—machinery some experts said couldn’t be invented—that operated without the natural lubricant of chocolate. They wanted to produce a totally digestible, quick natural energy source. They succeeded on all counts.

  It got to the point where U.S. cycling team members—led by people such as Davis Phinney of the 1988 Olympics— demanded Power Bars. The Olympic committee said no. Power Bar was not an official supplier.

  The cyclers nearly revolted, proclaiming they’d get Power Bars somehow. Within days the Olympic committee made Power Bar an official supplier, waving the requirement for sponsorship money. It was because the product was so good.

  The people at Power Bar knew they were right, that they were making a substitute candy bar that was great for athletes—it was digestible and it enhanced their performance. And now they had proof that the market accepted their product, since Olympic cyclers were demanding it.

  The people at Power Bar overcame two problems: the need for new machinery and an Olympic committee that was more wedded to the concept of raising sponsorship money than to the cyclists’ nutrition. Instinctively Power Bar knew they could build the new machinery, but convincing the Olympic committee took more than instinct. It took dogged perseverance.

  Imagine this scenario. You are Power Bar within your company. Your boss is the Olympic committee. You have invented a way to increase quality and efficiency in the company. But your boss says no. No way can that work; it’s not in the company manual, says the Boss.

  What should you say?

  Here’s what the people at Power Bar said: Rewrite the damn manual. Let’s do whatever has to be done.

  The determination to do whatever is required must, inevitably, be coupled with perseverance and irrepressible optimism to prevail.

  H. Ross Perot, the head of EDS, had those attributes when two of his employees were taken hostage in Iran in 1979. He organized his executives into a commando team and went to Iran to break his people free. He even visited the jail himself, under an assumed name, to give the hostages confidence. Perot and his team broke them out of the jail and ran them across the Iranian border. That’s passion. That’s commitment. That’s an instinct for knowing what needs to be done, and it’s the guts to do it.

  It takes more than just knowing what’s right. It takes the fortitude to stand by your passion in the face of overwhelming obstacles.

  The greatest commencement speech ever given was by Winston Churchill after World War II. It was an overcast day at his prep school alma mater, Harrow—one of many places he never excelled at academically.

  Churchill walked up to the podium. He looked at the crowd, all decked out in their caps and gowns. Every eye was on him. And he said, “Never give up.”

  He looked again at the crowd. It stirred slightly at his pause. “Never ever give up,” he said. He paused again. And finally he said, “Never give up.” With that thought he turned from the podium and sat back down.

  It is so simple yet so damned difficult, this idea of no surrender. It comes down to the essence of existence—a high-noon showdown with yourself. Do you have what it takes?

  Or don’t you?

  How much do you believe in your instinct? It’s easy to say, I know I’m right. It’s another thing to go ahead and prove it. I believe in trying to prove my beliefs—the way I see it, the meek will inherit nothing.

  George Lowe is a climber who failed in two attempts to climb the east face of Mt. Everest before he finally succeeded. The east face is tremendously challenging. If you’ve ever seen pictures, it looks basically like a vertical rope climb at 8,000 meters. Though there certainly is nothing easy about any side of Mt. Everest, the east face is unbelievable—it’s a real “gorilla.”

  Just to attempt climbing the east face of Mt. Everest is heroic. But to go again, after twice failing—that takes absolute passion, determination, and perseverance.

  When Lowe finally reached the top of Everest, he made a decision that was a bit selfish, yet in the realm of mountaineering completely understandable. He hacked off his support ropes after he came back down. He wanted others to take on the “gorilla” of the east face on their own just as he did. He was conquered by the passion of his sport, which was not bagging peaks but just plain mountaineering, with all its factors woven into one fabric—the planning, the pain, the struggle, and all of the luck associated with it.

  What I am saying is that to persevere like a Power Bars or a Churchill or a George Lowe you must live life at its core, walking on the raw nerve where you can feel the golden terrain of existence—a gestalt on this breathing planet. You have to take it all in and learn and grow and c
ome up with something to say at the end, just in case you get asked, “Do you have any regrets?”

  My friend Nick Nichols bills himself as the Indiana Jones of photography. He sometimes works with Bernie Krause, who collects sounds all over the world. Bernie, in fact, has produced very successful compact disks using only the sounds of nature. They’re incredible.

  They went to Africa a short while after Diane Fossey died and did some advance work for the movie Gorillas in the Mist, and for Nick’s books on gorillas. They lived one month over there. At first the primates thought Nick and Bernie were threatening them. At one point the gorillas picked the two of them up and started throwing them in the air.

  In business you may not get thrown around by gorillas. But it can seem that way. The point is, you have to stick it out. You have to tough it out, you have to make the sacrifices.

  Nichols and Krause did. By the end they fit in with the gorillas. They stayed there and kept acting as part of the environment, and actually they were.

  They did what they wanted to do—they lived the fullest way they knew. Even though it meant getting thrown around, it was fun.

  The gorillas of business can be just as hostile as those in the jungle. Your employees can be gorillas, your banker loves to be one, your competitors are by nature hostile gorillas, and even your customers will toss you around the minute something goes wrong. Every call a salesperson makes is to a gorilla. Some are nice, but think of this: The average number of calls a salesperson must make on a new account before closing a sale is five. The gorilla wins on the first four. The good salesperson keeps going back until eventually he, like Nichols and Krause, befriends the gorilla.

  There was a businessman like this, named Karsten Solheim. Karsten invented a great set of golf clubs, but he had to take on two gorillas: no money to speak of to produce them, and no testing equipment to prove his product. He didn’t let this deter him. Rather, he and his son hopped in his car and went into the desert. They blasted along at up to 100 miles per hour so Karsten’s son could hold different clubs out the window to see which ones caused what aerodynamic resistance. The desert wasn’t exactly the atmosphere of a test lab, but it didn’t matter. Karsten and the company he founded, Ping, went on to do quite well.

  Passion requires an uncommon nerve to face failure, disaster, shortages, and exhaustion and to stand back up and declare, Let’s do it again. It takes absolute dedication to the task at hand. It is not a two-minute drill of instant ego gratification, but rather a continuous surge of energy into the gland that controls creativity and internal drive. Passion is a fluid vision of the future.

  Ned Gillette is an explosion of vision—like an astronaut, a cowboy, and an engineer rolled into one human form. Gillette, with dark shaggy hair and wire-rim glasses, is thin, almost skinny, and in his 40s. His appearance is deceptive, though, because Gillette has phenomenal strength of both body and spirit.

  In 1983 Ned approached me with his plan for a rowboat trip to Antarctica—one of the few “firsts” left in the adventuring world. It sounded crazy, but as I knew from my past dealings with him, Ned doesn’t do crazy things. Oh sure, the vision started with a crazy idea. “It usually does,” said Ned. Rowing to Antarctica certainly stretched the traditional bounds of sanity.

  But Ned has a multidimensional view of his adventures, and the very first dimension he explores is that of safety. Ned’s is never a half-cocked light bulb of inspiration that fades into the memory of late-night braggadocio. His was a precise, step-by-step consideration of a problem—rowing through the Drake Passage, called by many the roughest seas in the world—and subsequent development of a solution.

  What appeared to the outside world to be the sexiest hell-on-wheels adventure in the history of mankind was really a small-scale NASA-type project with every contingency covered. Ned spent four years planning the trip, getting sponsors—including The North Face—and studying the weather patterns of the 600-mile stretch of open ocean that has been known to launch up to 60-foot seas and smash clipper ships like toothpicks.

  What makes Ned brilliant is that he is the perfect left brain-right brain mix. He has an almost Zen intuition about what will work and a persevering gut that won’t allow failure. He also has a work ethic and a dedication to detail that manufacture the vision of passion. A former member of the U.S. Olympic ski team and a dropout from an MBA program, Gillette tried a stint at selling encyclopedias before he happened on his career as a professional adventurer. What he did was become the best in the world.

  For years Ned planned and worked. It was staggering—designing the boat, raising the money for the expedition, learning the unique weather patterns of Drake Passage. There was so much more. This was no mere project; it was a voluntary trek through the wild currents of a clipper ship cemetery—through waters that never rose above 31 degrees Farenheit. For four years he trained for what eventually became a 21-day sojourn into water that Sir Francis Drake in 1578 described as “the most mad seas.”

  Finally he and three crew members went to Chile, to Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America. And they waited. What they were waiting for was a window of opportunity. First the ice in the passage had to melt. Then they needed to wait for the right day, with the right wind, to launch out into those mad seas. The right wind, if it comes at all, comes only during one month a year, and even then it is quite unpredictable. They knew that once they set off for Antarctica, they wouldn’t be able to come back. If they stopped before Antarctica, the current would overpower and sweep them off toward the south of Africa—a journey of weeks or months that no one on their vessel might survive.

  The ice never melted that year. Ned had to scrap his plan and wait for an entire year. During that year one of Ned’s partners took $35,000 of the money Ned had raised to finance the trip and spent it on himself. Rather than get discouraged by all the bad news, Gillette kept his promise to himself and pushed on the following year, when he and three others successfully rowed his bright-red ellipse of a boat—fondly named the Sea Tomato—to Antarctica.

  He persevered. And when he completed the trip, as is always the case with Ned, he immediately displayed his professionalism and business acumen by keeping all the promises he’d made to all of his sponsors as well. Keeping promises is absolutely essential. Your reputation is only as good as your word.

  Rather than waste time and let the experience become cold in his head, Ned immediately wrote down his thoughts. He wanted to make his presentations about the trip top notch. Also, he flew to Las Vegas for the annual backpacking and mountaineering show to speak to customers and employees of sponsoring companies. Needless to say, the sponsors, whom Gillette fondly thanked during his many public presentations, were quite impressed. Ned is truly a professional adventurer.

  And he is an ingenious professional. He found his passion, and he gutted out his adventure. He persevered. And every time one adventure ends for him, he ingeniously finds a way for someone to pay for him to go on another.

  Ned has been faced with a problem of his own choosing—he wants to do things that have never been done before. This makes ingenuity essential. It’s the same in business—business doesn’t need historians; it needs visionaries. The world is changing too fast to rely on old solutions.

  Ingenious decision making in an organization can ignite a spark of excitement that redundant decision making doesn’t. Ingenuity inspires. In business you have to be a Ned Gillette. You have to do what hasn’t been done before. You have to live your adventure to the fullest and constantly strive for better solutions.

  Another adventurer is Cliff Crilly, who learned the hard way why it was important for him to outlast a sensory-deprivation tank before he was allowed to go to Antarctica. Unlike Gillette, who wanted to experience going to Antarctica, Crilly wanted to experience living in Antarctica.

  The sensory-deprivation tank was hard enough. It was completely dark, and the tank was filled with a thick, warm liquid that created no waves. The first time Crilly went in, he s
tayed there for what seemed to be hours. When he finally came out, he was told he’d been inside for one entire minute. Sixty seconds.

  The next time he went in, he counted his heartbeat. He thought he had been inside for quite some time. But when he came out, they said he had stayed inside for only four minutes—which says something about the speed of his heartbeat.

  Again Crilly went into the sensory-deprivation tank. But that time the operators of the tank had to tap on Crilly’s shoulder 3½ hours later. He had found peace inside the tank. He was happy.

  Onward to Antarctica went Crilly, who is, by the way, a good friend. He was on a mapping expedition with one other explorer in a mountainous region near the South Pole. Suddenly it was as if a wall of weather came at them, and they were overcome by a whiteout. An absolute whiteout that took visibility to zero. It made walking impossible. Vertigo was their daily partner. They could do nothing but wait out the storm.

  They set up camp and went to sleep. When they awoke, it was the same—blowing snow; swirling, gusting, blindness. They were stuck.

  But they had a small radio, and so they called out for food drops from rescue airplanes. They found the food by walking in concentric circles around their tent while tethered to it so they wouldn’t get lost.

  Days passed. The weather stayed the same. It got worse, if anything. It all became a strange routine. Word games and card games and stories and endless hours of self-examination. At some point, I don’t care what Crilly says, he must have thought: What the hell am I doing here?

  Thirty-one days passed. Thirty-one. All along, Crilly knew the answer to his question. He was waiting for the weather to pass so he could get on with his mapping expedition.

  Look at the faces of people when you walk through life. Many have a set, comfortable, dull glare. No animation, no drive, and no vitality. Very few have the eyes of a Cliff Crilly, willing to endure almost anything to achieve his goal. Instead the look is one of settled acceptance—of someone beaten down by fraudulent authority for so long that there is no energy to fight on. It’s sad, so much wasted human potential.