Upward Bound: Nine Original Accounts of How Business Leaders Reached Their Summits

by Michael Useem, Jerry Useem, Paul Asel

Your team has faltered at a critical moment. A key member says he can’t continue, requiring you to make a snap Do you write him off? Or do you risk the whole venture by trying to get him back on his feet?

It could be a scenario straight from the business world.

Yet this one occurred high on the slopes of the world’s deadliest mountain, K2, where lives, not just livelihoods, depended on the leader’s choice.

Decisions don’t get much starker. That’s why mountains—though seemingly a world apart from business—hold unique and surprising insights for managers and entrepreneurs at any altitude. More than just symbols of our upward strivings, they are high-altitude management testing grounds where risk, fear, opportunity, and ambition collide in the most unforgiving of settings.

Upward Bound brings together a remarkable team of nine writers equally at home among the high peaks and in the corridors of corporate power, including Good to Great author Jim Collins, legendary climber and outdoor clothing entrepreneur Royal Robbins, and Stacy Allison, the first American woman to summit Mount Everest. Their riveting, often harrowing accounts, reveal

• Why rock climbers’ distinction between failure (giving up before reaching the edge of your abilities) and what they call “fallure” (committing 100 percent and using up all your energy and reserves) can help companies transcend their vertical limits
• What happens when a leader abdicates responsibility in the Death Zone of Mount Everest—and how a similar vacuum at sea level can corrupt corporate purpose
• How large climbing expeditions use exquisite organization and “pyramids of people” to place just two climbers on top, making heroes of some from the sacrifice of all
• What “ridge-walking” between deadly avalanches and the lure of Mount McKinley’s summit taught a venture capitalist about nurturing risky high-tech start-ups
• How a simple insight—using “proximate goals”—propelled a faltering climber up El Capitan in a seemingly undoable solo ascent, a ten-day lesson that would later jump-start a business
• Why more accessible peaks like Mount Sinai can exert a pull every bit as powerful as Mount Everest
• How to think like a guide

While most people will never find themselves in the thin air of the world’s highest places, Upward Bound brings those places down to earth for anyone seeking the path to his or her own summit. Whether it’s up the career ladder or toward a creative peak, Upward Bound addresses the fundamental question of why we climb, while capturing the power of mountains to instruct as well as inspire.

Genres: Outdoors, Management

256 pages, Hardcover

First published November 4, 2003

About the author

Michael Useem is a professor in the Management Department and Faculty Director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management and McNulty Leadership Program at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His university teaching includes MBA and executive-MBA courses on management and leadership, and he offers programs on leadership and governance for managers in the United States, Asia, Europe, and Latin America.  He works on leadership development with many companies and organizations in the private, public and nonprofit sectors.

He is co-anchor for a weekly program “Leadership in Action” on SiriusXM Radio Channel 132 and co-director of the annual CEO Academy. He is the author of The Leader’s Checklist, The Strategic Leader’s Roadmap (with Harbir Singh), The Edge: How Ten CEOs Learned to Lead—And the Lessons for Us All, Go Long: Why Long-Term Thinking Is Your Best Short-Term Strategy (with Dennis Carey, Brian Dumaine, and Rodney Zemmel). Mastering Catastrophic Risk (with Howard Kunreuther), Fortune Makers: The Leaders Creating China’s Great Global Companies (with Harbir Singh, Neng Liang, and Peter Cappelli), The India Way (with Peter Cappelli, Harbir Singh, and Jitendra Singh), and Boards That Lead (with Ram Charan and Dennis Carey).

Reviews

[Bill Donhiser · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of stories from business people/mountain climbers who relate their business practices to the art of mountain climbing. Some of the stories are better than others. Each has its own take away.