Setting and Surpassing Extraordinary Business Goals

Beyond the Summit: Setting and Surpassing Extraordinary Business Goals
by Todd Skinner

World-class rock climber Todd Skinner is also one of today's most sought-after motivational speakers for business audiences. Whenever he describes his history-making sixty-day free climb of the 20,500-foot Trango Tower in the Karakoram Himalayas (shown on the jacket), people are in awe of his stamina, skill, ambition, and determination. They are also eager to apply his lessons in their professional and personal lives.

Skinner argues that everyone has a mountain to climb, whether it's meeting your annual sales target or launching a new product or getting your department to improve its teamwork. And he stresses that you should set your goals even higher than you normally would, and constantly look beyond the current summit to the next one. For instance, instead of aiming for 10 percent revenue growth, go after a seemingly impossible 50 percent target, and then think of new ways to get there.

In both rock climbing and business, you must define your exact mission, assemble the right team, make the critical transition from preparation to action, have courage when crossing difficult terrain, and weather the storms well. Skinner offers fresh insights into all of these topics and explains principles such as:

• how you think is more important than what you know
• pick teammates for what they will do, not what they have already done
• make decisions in answer to the mountain
• fall toward the summit
• see each challenge as part of a bigger picture, your lifelong ascent

Beyond the Summit presents fresh and inspiring advice on leadership, teamwork, and decision-making skills, combined with an epic adventure tale.

I might have dedicated this book to Wyoming's Wind River Mountains my earliest and most influential teachers for it was there I first began to understand the profound transformative power of great challenges. When I stood on my first summit at the age of eleven, what I could see was mountains all around me, and more mountains beyond me: beautiful, sunlit granite ramparts all beckoning me to climb them as well.

Even then I realized I could not climb them all, and I would have to find a way to choose among them. And I knew I wasn't a good-enough climber yet to reach the summit of those I did choose. But I found that the mountains themselves have the power to make us good enough the challenge encourages us to rise to meet it, and each mountain prepares us to climb the next.

After more than thirty years of aspiring to reach the most challenging summits all over the world, I am still finding mountains that are beyond me, choosing among them for which will give me the greatest capacity to climb farther, and discovering strategies that improved my success not just in climbing, but in every other endeavor. The rare and valuable lessons I have brought back from the mountains are presented here for the climber in us all, because mountains provide a natural metaphor for challenging goals in both business and life.

In 1989, when I first began to speak about what mountains have taught me, it was to audiences of outdoor and climbing enthusiasts; but I was soon recruited by forward- thinking corporations because I was seen as an extreme innovator in my field. I still remember the first time I stood in front of that new audience a very successful, world- renowned, cutting-edge technology company with five thousand faces looking up at me. They probably were wondering what a rock climber could tell them about business. I was wondering how to translate my world to theirs, how I could illustrate the parallels I knew they would find useful, and explain my passion for seeking higher ground.

I found to my amazement that they didn't need a translation, because we spoke the same language. They already thought like first ascensionists they saw immediately how a storm on the mountain was like a downturn in the economy, that crevasses are business pitfalls, and difficult terrain requires the same problem-solving skills no matter where that terrain is. Our common ground was an elevated field of endeavor, the very nature of the quest. They knew what it felt like to stand below an audacious mountain, to pursue improbable goals, and how the most compelling journeys begin where the map ends.

I was rewarded at the end of the presentation with my first standing ovation. Many individuals came up to me afterward to tell me about storms or crevasses they had faced in their respective fields, and I was surprised at the variety of ways they had interpreted and planned to use the lessons I had offered. I saw then that it was much better to let them make their own connections to what I had found to be true in the high mountains. I will let you make the connections to your own personal climbs as well, for wherever we are, even on flat ground, there are mountains all around us.

To successfully climb a mountain or to succeed at any endeavor, you must know how to define your objective, choose the best team for that objective and prepare for the unknown, make the critical transition from preparation to action, cross up and over difficult terrain, weather the storms well, and go the distance to the summit to complete your objective.

This book contains essential strategies to help you navigate through that journey. And while they are distilled from my experiences on real mountains, they are designed to be applied to any kind of challenge you undertake, and have been successfully incorporated by the many intrepid individuals, and companies, who have also asked me to speak about our parallel journeys of ascent.

The Mountain: Why Climb?

This book began at 19,500 feet, dangling on the side of a rocket-shaped mountain I was told could not be climbed, fifty-eight days into an ascent I thought would take fifteen. I was sitting, exhausted, in the door of an unstable hanging tent pinned by one anchor to the sheer wall, my feet swinging out over two thousand feet of thin air. My shredded hands were bleeding through layers of protective tape, and my lips and ears had been scalded and blistered by the unfiltered sun. I watched the haunted faces of my teammates, swinging on ropes to chip ice to melt for water, looking to gauge what reserves they might have left. After months in this killing altitude, our strength was decimated, the food and fuel we came with was almost gone, and we were the last climbers still alive in the most deadly season in Karakoram history.

Surrounded by clouds, curling in tendrils around peak after endless peak to the darkened horizon, with drifting flakes of snow a reminder that the Himalayan winter had arrived, I felt compelled to think about the mountains that had led me to this far point. They had been improbable mountains, even impossible, some had thought not pyramid mountains but parabolic, their sheared-off faces thousands of feet high, steep beyond vertical and seeming to defy ascent using only hands and feet. I began to study why, against all odds, I had succeeded on those mountains. And why, on this mountain, I was so close to failing.

I had crossed half the world, trekked through the most precipitous terrain on earth, fought my way up a vertical mile of mountain, and had only 350 feet that remained to be climbed to reach this mountain's summit. But I did not know if what remained could be climbed. All the decisions we make on an expedition affect the outcome, and I pondered if there was something I could have done differently to make this outcome less uncertain. Did I make the right choices yesterday? Ten days earlier? Ten years ago? What, I wondered, leads to success? What, in fact, is the definition of success? How can the balance between success and failure teeter as precariously as the hanging tent I was perched on?

If I could finally distill the lessons that each mountain had taught me, I would have a guidebook to bring with me for all mountains. That guidebook wouldn't be a compendium of answers, but a set of strategies to help find answers in unknown terrain. It would identify the hazards and obstacles in any ascent, and discover ways to navigate through those obstacles. It would list the essentials you need to carry in your backpack when venturing into the frontier, and, just as important, what you essentially need to leave behind.

As the Himalayan night closed in with its cold and hostile embrace, I thought about strategies that would help me tomorrow, and would still be helping me twenty years from tomorrow. After that night I continued to think, to distill, to test and revise, to construct a strategic framework for success when you are facing the unknown, and this book is the end result. The last question I might have asked myself that dark and frigid night was: "Why was I here?" But that answer I already knew.

I was here because I heard that it was the highest freestanding spire and potentially most challenging free climb in the world a dagger of golden granite rising 20,500 feet into the frozen sky of the Karakoram Himalayas. On the west side lay Pakistan and the border of Afghanistan. To the southeast stretched India, Nepal, and Tibet, and directly east China staggered with mountains unnamed and unclimbed. The daunting east face of Trango Tower was ominously steep and sheer, with thin cracks and tiny ledges barely discernible along its rising face. The Himalayan experts, those who had been on Everest and nearby K2, doubted it could be climbed using only hands and feet, and at first I had no reason to question their disbelief.

Copyright © 2003 Todd Skinner. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission.

About the Author

Todd Skinner, a Wyoming native, has established new climbs at the highest levels of difficulty in more than twenty-six countries. His experiences have been described in National Geographic and Life, and his expeditions to places as exotic as the Amazon and Timbuktu have been featured in nine documentaries. He is also a popular speaker at business events around the country.