Every project or initiative has a goal—a metaphorical summit if you will—that, if reached, is symbolic of success. Not every endeavor ends at the summit, of course. Some attempts fail; others are abandoned along the way.
When it comes to achieving goals, few are more treacherous than trying to reach the top of Mount Everest, which at 29,029 feet is the highest point above sea level in the world.
Since 1953, only about 12,000 people have successfully reached the Mount Everest summit, a treacherous journey for even experienced climbers. For perspective, more than twice as many people currently live in Key West, Florida. So when you encounter someone who not only made it to the summit but also did so with three other family members, you don’t pass up an opportunity to learn more.
After all, for Alan Mallory climbing is part of his DNA. Well, sort of. While not blood-related, Mallory shares a common ancestor with George Herbert Leigh Mallory. In 1924, that Mallory attempted to reach the Mount Everest summit—nearly three decades before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay did—but whether he made it remains a mystery as he lost his life during the expedition.
Alan Mallory was one of the keynote speakers at this year’s PrismHR LIVE in Nashville. His session, titled “Reaching New Heights: Life Lessons from the Top of Mount Everest” was sponsored by PrismHR Marketplace partner Ameritas.
We caught up with Alan Mallory at LIVE to learn more about his experience and what lessons the business world can take from his ascent to the Mount Everest summit. An edited transcript follows.
When you were climbing Mount Everest, I bet you weren’t thinking about Professional Employer Organizations or speaking at a PEO conference. What were you thinking about and what brings you to PrismHR LIVE today?
Alan Mallory: This is true. I guess at that point, I wasn’t thinking about kind of where this journey would lead me. But it’s quite a unique story … and there are a lot of parallels between what we went through in the two years of planning and the two months of actual execution or climbing and what PEOs would we be faced with. In terms of the volatility. We’re operating in volatile environments. So how do we adapt?
How does the business world tie into your Everest story?
Alan Mallory: There’s lots of different parallels throughout, but if you’re talking about risks in particular, it’s understanding the risks you’re up against. In a business environment, nothing is risk-free. I mean, there’s no reward without risk, you could look at it like that. And so the whole idea is to understand the risks that you’re having to either accept or you can mitigate or transfer. There are other ways we can deal with risks to try to reduce the likelihood of them or the impact should they occur. And that’s the type of thing we’re looking at. And some of the mitigation strategies, for example, controlling the time of day. We went through certain areas that were particularly volatile or became more active when the sun would hit the ice and expand the ice. For example, there’s a particular section, which is quite dangerous. And so there are a lot of parallels. That’s exactly how you should look at any challenging endeavor—understand the risks and figure out how you can mitigate them.
Are there lessons from how you had to get acclimated to the heights you were at and the lack of oxygen? Is there a parallel there in terms of getting acclimated to maybe your clients or the business environment or socioeconomic factors, etc.?
Alan Mallory: I think there’s a lot of parallels in particular when it comes to agility in volatile environments. In today’s business environment, that’s often the case. Things are changing very quickly. Your clients’ needs are changing very quickly. And so in mountaineering, you almost have this built-in agility. In an Everest in particular, we’re planning for a one- to two-week push into the altitude to trigger the production of the protective red blood cells. But if we, as part of the acclimatization process, if you stay there, you’ll get an edema, lose your life. So you come back down, and that’s when you incorporate the lessons from that particular iteration and make adjustments. In a business environment, [that] is particularly valuable, because otherwise you can be very efficient at going the wrong direction. And so you need to have some sort of feedback mechanism. And that’s exactly what that type of iterative approach, which is at the heart of an agile mentality, allows you to do.
How hard is communication on the mountain, including language barriers with Sherpas, and is there a parallel there to the business world?
Alan Mallory: In terms of communication, we did have two Sherpas. They spoke English, but it was kind of broken English. We’re pretty good as humans at reading nonverbal body language and determining: Is there a hidden agenda? Is there something I’m missing here? We never got that feeling. And we really did build a great relationship with our two Sherpas. I would say we became friends more than anything over that two-month period. And it was a huge advantage we had over the majority of the other teams. There were six of us all working together to make this a reality. And so that was important. In general, though, communication is a challenge. It’s [also] a challenge communicating with your stakeholders back home because there’s very little means of doing that. We had a satellite phone, but it was kind of an emergency thing. And so that put everyone through quite an emotional rollercoaster because people died on the mountain. It would show up in the media. They don’t release the name right away. And on the mountain, you can communicate fairly well through these radios, although we did have challenges with them, and they would fail at times. Even when you have other climbers beside you, let’s say it was my father, my sister or brother, because you’re well into the very high altitude, you’re wearing an oxygen mask, but even below them, it’s so exhausting to move your body or do anything that you don’t do a lot of communication when you’re climbing.
What overall lessons did you take away from your experience?
Alan Mallory: In terms of the big lessons that I took away from this expedition, I guess the first, you might say, is the importance of setting lofty goals in life and continuously pushing yourself a little bit out of your comfort zone. You know, we can kind of get in this place of stagnation. And I’ve had that at times in my life. … But we’re kind of built for overcoming some sort of adversity on the way to accomplishing something of value. And that can be in mountaineering or business or HR or athletics or philanthropy or whatever it is. And so I would say that that was the first lesson [is] … the importance of setting those lofty goals and not letting too much get in the way. … The second, it might be something around planning, you know, the climbers that are successful, they don’t just throw money at this. ‘We’ll figure it out when we get there.’ They invest in the years of preparing themselves mentally and physically and understanding the risks and understanding everything involved so that they’re not having to make as many critical decisions in the very high altitude when you’re prone to making errors anyway. And so take that type of thing seriously in mountaineering, but in other things you’re involved with in life. Now the other side of that I would say is this is where agility comes in. Don’t have such a fixed mentality that you’re not able to adapt when you are faced with volatility. And Everest is maybe the ultimate example of that. … So that might be the third: Be agile in the way that you adapt to challenging situations in environments that are thrown at you.
Is the question you get asked the most about why you chose to climb Mount Everest?
Alan Mallory: Why did I choose to do it? It’s an interesting question and it’s difficult to do, say, a cost-benefit analysis on something like this, because the benefit is some sort of personalization or satisfaction. But like a lot of things in my life, you know, if you’re intrinsically motivated, a lot of things end up being for that elation and satisfaction, proving to yourself that you can [do it]. My ancestor, George Herbert Leigh Mallory, who was a famous climber back in the ‘20s … I’ve heard his answer to that question was, ‘If you have to ask the question of why climb, you will not understand the answer.’ And so it kind of gets at that intrinsic motivation of the difficulty in doing a cost-benefit analysis because it’s some sort of personal satisfaction and elation.
James Tehrani is PrismHR’s content marketing manager. He is an award-winning writer and editor based in the Chicago area.
