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RelationTrips
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Personal, Practical Advice for Every Traveler
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Varied Motives
We converge on Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, by air from destinations as
diverse as San Francisco and Santiago. We each complete a landing card
whose choices for arriving must be unique in the world: “holiday
pleasure,” “trekking,” or “mountaineering.”
The next morning we’re
back at the airport for a 7 a.m. flight to Lukla, a tiny tilted runway
built
by Sir Edmund Hillary on a high plateau as a gateway to the Mount
Everest
region. The choice of domestic airlines leaves no doubt where we are:
Mountain
Air, Buddha Airways and Everest Air.
The pilot aims his aircraft at the Lukla
runway and his angle seems better for dive-bombing than safe-landing.
At the last second, however, he pulls up, we drop onto the gravel
surface, and a minute later we find ourselves at 9,320 feet among a
swirling multitude of trekkers and Sherpas.
Before setting forth up the trail to Mount Everest, we assemble for a
“before” photograph featuring 11 recent graduates of the WEMBA program:
Mun
Fenton, Jan Hartmann, Anne Libby, Leontina Marcotulli, Randy Ment,
Evelyn Nagel, Daniel Neal, Anita Orellana, Sara Sutherland, Tim Urekew,
and Chris Witt. Besides the two of us, they are accompanied by two
brothers, Eugene Nagel and Pedro Orellana; a sister, Marialidia
Marcotulli; a former WEMBA student employee, Sabrina Lowe; a faculty
member, Peter Dean; and a daughter, Andrea Useem.
Disparate motives have brought us together. One participant intends to
conquer the high anxieties of his workplace by mastering the high
altitude challenges of the trek. Another seeks the opportunity to
explore management issues in an environment totally different from the
daily routine back
home.
A third is looking for a “once in a lifetime experience,” and a fourth
says she wants to learn more about leadership. A fifth person confesses
that
he’s come in part as a reconnaissance for a possible climb of Mount
Everest.
To make the most of our itinerary, we have
prepared a 16-page trek “syllabus,” a detailed outline of our daily
destinations and trailside seminars. Each day of the trek, two of the
participants assume leadership responsibilities, explaining our
destination, assigning trail tasks
and organizing special events.
We’ve already steeped ourselves in mountaineering narratives and
studies of Eastern cultures, digesting a list of trek readings and even
a “bulkpack” with excerpts on cross-cultural leadership, Tibetan
Buddhism and Sherpa society.
Trekking and climbing provide evocative
metaphors for transcending challenges and attaining goals. During
mid-day and evening seminars for the next 10 days, we use a range of
topics to reflect on our personal and team leadership. From
“Responsibility Under Extreme Stress” and “Divergent Concepts of
Leadership and Teamwork” to “The Buddhist Path to Awakening” and
“Alternative Paths to the Top,” we ask ourselves a number of questions:
- Can the mysterious hidden valleys of Tibetan
lore, some resembling the fictional Shangri-La of James Hilton’s novel,
Lost Horizon, offer fresh in sights into the meaning of leadership and
teamwork?
- Sherpas traditionally elect people to serve
as village heads only if they do not aggressively seek the position.
Anybody who wants the job for personal benefit is viewed as unfit to
serve the community. How do non-Western ways of approaching authority
reveal different possibilities of leading and working together as a
team?
- In the first American expedition to Mt.
Everest, one group chose the unclimbed but riskier West Ridge, a second
group the previously climbed but more certain South Col route. What
motivated the teams
to take such different approaches, and, in turn, what distinctive forms
of leadership and teamwork did each require? What went
right — and what went wrong — on the fateful day of May 10, 1996, when
three
climbing expeditions, all nearing the summit of Mt. Everest, were hit
by
a violent storm?
- What does it mean to attain a summit? How
can
we incorporate the experience into the rest of our lives? What should
be
next?
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