Chapter 5
COMPLACENCY WILL KILL YOU
Make Your Move
In 1970, a Japanese extreme skier, thirty-seven-year-old Yuichiro Miura, became the first person to ski down Mount Everest.
He descended 4,200 vertical feet in 140 seconds. He had a parachute strapped to his back, which he was hoping would slow his speed to a manageable level. It didn’t. Miura slid, tumbled, lost a ski, and miraculously came to a halt just a few hundred feet before the edge of a crevasse.
He may not have done it in the style he had hoped—but hell, he did it. He set a world record and he lived to tell. The film about his adventure, The Man Who Skied Down Everest, earned an Academy Award for best documentary feature and was the first sports film to do so. Miura is one of the most impressive extreme athletes in the world. Not only was he the first person to ski at an altitude above 26,000 feet; he also later went back to summit Everest. Multiple times. The first time at age seventy. The second at age seventy-five. But hold on, I’m not done: on May 23, 2013—at age eighty—Miura once again stood on Everest’s summit and set a world record as the oldest person to do so. No, I’m not kidding. So the next time Grandpa says he’s too tired to throw a ball around with his grandkids in the backyard, remind him of Yuichiro Miura.
The 1970 Japanese Everest Ski Expedition that made Miura an international sensation went down in the history books for more than just his incredible feat. It was also one of the most tragic Everest expeditions, as six Sherpas were killed in an avalanche in the Khumbu Icefall. It was the worst single accident on the south side of the mountain and one of the most devastating incidents ever to hit the Sherpa community. (An avalanche in 1922 on the north side of the peak took the lives of seven Sherpas.) In extreme environments, even when things feel relatively calm, there is still a significant amount of risk, as landscapes can change in an instant.
The Khumbu Icefall lies between base camp and Camp 1 on the Nepal side of Mount Everest, and it is one of the deadliest parts of the mountain. This section of the route rises 2,000 feet and looks like an obstacle course from some wild science fiction movie. The entire thing is comprised of massive ice towers called seracs, which can be as large as school buses. Or houses. The Icefall, which is part of an enormous glacier, is always in a state of motion, and it moves at a rate of about four feet per day. When the sun comes out and the ice softens, these building-size ice chunks start to shift around. Every once in a while, one or more of them will collapse onto the route, so climbers are in constant danger of being crushed. Picture yourself trying to make your way through a gigantic life-size game of Jenga, but instead of wood the blocks are made of ice. When the wrong piece moves, the entire structure can come crashing down, demolishing everything around it.
To increase the chance of making it through without incident, climbers typically start their journey through the Icefall in the early morning hours. It’s not unusual to begin at 3:00 a.m. so that you finish the trip (or at least get through most of it) when things are still fairly frozen. Once day breaks and things begin to warm up, the Icefall becomes more unstable and potentially more dangerous.
Maneuvering through this area is made even more complicated by the fact that there are huge crevasses everywhere that add yet another layer of serious danger. At the onset of each climbing season, the Sherpas who are working as the Icefall Doctors prepare the Icefall for climbers by spanning rickety aluminum ladders over the largest of the various crevasses so that the climbers can cross from one side to the other without plunging to their deaths. Some sections of the Icefall require two, three, or even more ladders to be strung together in order for climbers to pass over crevasses or up steep walls of ice.
When you try to walk or crawl across multiple ladders that have been strung together, they bounce, they sway, they creak, and they can really freak you out. Keep in mind that you are maneuvering across these ladders at an elevation of more than 18,000 or 19,000 feet, so it’s tricky to balance—especially if your feet are too small to span two ladder rungs. So when you’re trying to make your way across a gargantuan crevasse and you’re perched up on a ladder and it starts to sway or dip, it can be really scary (like, “Clean up on aisle four” kind of scary).
To increase safety, fixed lines of rope are laced throughout the Icefall so that climbers can clip into the lines and perhaps be spared a fall if the ladders should happen to give way or, say, the ground supporting the ladders should unexpectedly open up. While the avalanches and falling seracs remain constant threats that cannot be prevented, clipping into the fixed safety lines can indeed lessen the risk somewhat for climbers when it comes to crevasse falls or losing balance on a ladder.
When my teammates and I were making our final pass through the Icefall in 2002, heading down to base camp for the last time, a large chunk of the Icefall collapsed right behind us, leaving a climber dangling from a ladder by one wrist. Because he was able to move quickly and had properly clipped himself to a safety line, he survived the death trap and walked away from that jungle of ice, shaken but relatively unharmed. It was one of the most dramatic things I have ever witnessed. He was one of the lucky ones. Similar accidents have claimed many lives over the years.
The Icefall’s fearsome and well-deserved reputation sometimes plays a role in people’s decision to climb Everest from the north side, approaching from Tibet. Even the Sherpas who make the mountain home for several months each season (and are generally more comfortable on its slopes than many of the foreign climbers) fear the Icefall. When they stock camps higher up the mountain, they carry the heaviest loads they can possibly manage to minimize the number of times they must travel through the Icefall. It’s pretty standard for the Sherpas to blow past the rest of us when going through the Icefall, since they are more practiced. The Sherpas gracefully dance across the ladders and make it look effortless, while the rest of us cautiously balance our way across, hoping like hell we don’t fall into the abyss below. Here’s the thing, though: Sherpas and other climbers who feel pretty confident on this tricky terrain don’t always take the proper precautions to ensure their safety. Often their sense of security is false.
One of the first of many casualties of the 2012 climbing season was Namgyal Tshering Sherpa, who fell into a crevasse in the Khumbu Icefall and died. This was such a heartbreaker because had he clipped into the fixed lines, he probably would have survived the fall. Namgyal was an experienced climber and had summited Everest twice—in 2010 and 2011. He might have made it a third time had he simply followed the proper safety protocol.
It’s easy to become complacent when something seems routine. Flying though the Icefall with the greatest of ease is commonplace for the Sherpas, so some of them skip the essential step of clipping into the ropes—which takes only a few seconds to do. If someone has failed to take the proper precautions and has gotten away with it fifty times, they don’t think to do anything differently. But once in a while, on the fifty-first time, it doesn’t work out.
Continuing risky behavior because you’ve gotten away with it in the past is a serious form of complacency, and it also sets a dangerous example for others. On one of my trips through the Icefall, a young guy climbing just ahead of me often failed to clip into the safety lines. Maybe he observed some Sherpas not following safe climbing protocol, and for some reason he thought it was okay for him to do the same. His skills were nowhere near the skills of the Sherpas, but he was too naïve to realize that. The guides noticed his behavior and suggested that he clip into the ropes, but he didn’t seem to listen. When we were about two-thirds of the way though the Icefall he turned around and asked those of us behind him, “Does it bother you that I don’t clip into the ropes?”
He apparently thought he was so skilled that he didn’t need to worry about safety. I answered, “No, no, not at all.”
Why would it bother me? Hell, I wasn’t going to be responsible for the costs associated with repatriating his body. His rich parents would be writing that check. Okay, I’m being sarcastic here; I definitely didn’t want to see anything bad happen to this guy. But by putting himself in danger, he was increasing the chances of an accident that would require other climbers to spend time on dangerous terrain trying to rescue him (or recover his corpse). Later on, another climber also failed to clip into the fixed ropes in the Icefall, and she sustained severe injuries to her face and spine in a fall. Only then did this careless young man modify his behavior.
Unfortunately, not all accidents in the Icefall are avoidable. The six Sherpas who perished in the 1970 avalanche were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The mountain is a dangerous place and that’s not going to change, which makes it all the more important to find ways to increase your odds of survival.
But if you can’t make the ground more stable or prevent a serac from falling, how do you mitigate your risk, given you have to travel through this area multiple times throughout your two-month expedition? How do you stack the deck in your favor when you are dealing with a landscape that is constantly changing and impossible to predict? Is there anything you can do to increase the odds of emerging on the other side not only unscathed, but also in a position of strength? Yes. And the key is agility. You move swiftly, you move efficiently, and you remain ready to act and to react quickly as the environment around you is shifting and changing. While you won’t eliminate the risk, you’ll significantly reduce it and therefore increase your chances of survival.
The Khumbu Icefall taught me one of the most critical lessons about mountaineering, business, leadership, and life: fear is fine, but complacency will kill you.
Don’t ever beat yourself up for feeling scared or intimidated. Fear is a natural human emotion, and it’s a strong survival instinct that keeps us alert and aware of our surroundings. But fear doesn’t have to keep us from pursuing a challenge. The real danger often comes from failing to react to shifts in the world around us—whether those changes take the form of a collapsed ladder, a sudden avalanche, regulatory changes within an industry, changes in consumer behavior, competitive threats, or the evolution of our chosen professional fields. In our work as well as when climbing, complacency can lead to extinction, threatening our livelihoods and our lives.
With all the unpredictable, uncontrollable shifts that occur in the mountains or in life, it’s important to be prepared to deal with change. In the Icefall, climbers never know how or when the landscape will change, but they know damn well that the monstrous blocks of ice surrounding them are going to keep moving, so if they are going to survive, they have to keep moving, too. This isn’t an area where you can hang out and take rest breaks. It’s not the place to stop and call your mom on your satellite phone and wish her happy Mother’s Day (believe me, she won’t be happy to hear that you’re calling her from the shade of a sixty-foot serac). The key to increasing your chance of survival is to get through the area as fast as you can while keeping your eyes and ears open for sudden shifts in the ice. Because the environment is constantly changing shape, you may need to reroute yourself on occasion if a section that was safe to cross the last time no longer looks safe. You expect the landscape to constantly evolve, and while you don’t know exactly what it will look like from one hour to the next, you remain in a state of readiness to react to whatever changes come about.
The bottom line here is that agility is key to survival. To increase your speed through the Icefall, you need to increase your proficiency in ladder crossings, rappelling steep faces, and climbing vertical pitches. If you’re skilled in these things, you will move through the Icefall faster. Of course, proficiency between 18,000 and 20,000 feet is different from proficiency at sea level, so you want to practice these skills at altitude.
The following is an excerpt from my 2010 expedition journal:
April 18. Yesterday was our first foray into the dreaded Khumbu Icefall, which is 2,000 vertical feet of massive ice chunks that are unstable and can topple over at any time. The terrain is nonstop unevenness, and just about every step you take has to be carefully positioned. Crevasses are everywhere, and the ones that are too big to jump over have aluminum ladders across them to help us get to the other side. Everyone did pretty well navigating the terrain. We were really prepared, and that’s because ever since we arrived at base camp we have spent every day practicing our ice-climbing and ladder-crossing skills. Being in good climbing shape is only one small part of the equation for success on a big mountain like this—technical expertise is also important.
Because the Icefall is constantly changing shape, you can’t always count on ladders being where you want them to be. For example, there could be a 30′ vertical wall of ice that has a ladder going up it one day, and as the Icefall melts that ladder could fall into a crevasse the next day, so you have to find a way to get up and down that pitch minus the assistance from any Home Depot accessories. So, in order to prepare for this type of situation, we practiced on a 25′ ice wall just outside of base camp and everyone took turns going up and down it with just two standard ice axes (vs. proper ice-climbing tools, which we do not have with us, but improvisation is always going to come into play in the mountains). It was challenging, to say the least, given we are at about 17,600′ of elevation here at base camp.
Actually, every activity seems challenging at 17,600′, and I get winded just walking from my tent to the mess tent for meals. (Much to my disappointment, there is no room service here. I must have misread the brochure.) We spent hours practicing our Icefall skills—ascending the ice wall and rappelling down the backside—and also practiced going across/up/down aluminum ladders in crampons. At one point my teammate Greg was descending the ice wall and somehow managed to… um… well, let’s just say the family jewels may have lost some of their value. How much, I’m not sure exactly. All I know is that I was standing on the other side of the ice wall practicing my rappelling techniques, and I heard him screaming out in pain (and it sounded unusually high-pitched)—must have been a problem with the way his carabiner was positioned on the front of his harness, not sure, really—didn’t want to ask as I figured it was a sore subject. He came down from the ice wall and was doubled over in pain. He’s a pretty tough guy, though, so I’m sure he’ll recover.
Anyway… the ice wall was not our favorite thing to practice on—just hard to do without the right tools and at 17,600′ of elevation, but we all knew we needed to do it in order to be able to travel quickly through the Icefall as a team. After all nine of us went up and down the ice wall once, it was time to cycle through a second time. I was dreading doing it again, because I was pretty winded after several hours of ice climbing and rappelling and ladder practice. One by one, seven of my climbing partners went up and down that ice wall a second time, and it was now down to Greg and me to finish up the rotation. Vern Tejas, one of the most senior guides on the mountain, looked at Greg and said, “Your turn to go up again, Greg.” Greg replied, “No can do. My balls hurt.” He had a pretty legit excuse for not getting up on the ice wall obstacle course again. Since Greg was out, I knew it was my turn next, but I was so comfortable sitting on a rock nursing my bruised knees from some of the previous exercises, and I didn’t want to move. Vern looked over at me and called for me to come over and give the ice wall another shot, but before he could get the last syllable of my name out of his mouth I looked up and quipped, “Uh, my balls hurt, too!!!!!” thinking I might be able to weasel my way out of having to climb again.
But he didn’t buy it for some reason (maybe I don’t have a good poker face, I don’t know) and rolled his eyes and laughed and motioned for me to get myself up that ice wall again. I huffed and puffed as I struggled up the frozen wall with an ice axe in each hand, strategically placing the pick of each axe so that it would hold me as I struggled to find a good foothold.… I jammed the front points of my crampons straight into the ice and moved my way up, and eventually I made it up and back down in one piece. It wasn’t the climbing itself that was hard—I’ve done plenty of ice climbing in the past, just not at 17,600 feet, and everything seems like a huge effort at this elevation, as we are not yet properly acclimatized. And of course we never like to practice the skills we are weak in, because it is always more fun to perform the things we are good at—especially when there is an audience there. Practicing on the ice wall near base camp wasn’t just about building confidence—it was about getting in the groove of moving quickly, because speed matters in that icefall. The faster you can get through it, the less time you spend in it, and the lower your chances are of dying before you reach the next camp.
Because the Icefall is by far the most unpredictable part of the route on Everest, climbers tend to have their guard up when making their way through it. But risk is everywhere on big mountains, and the risk exists all the time, even when things feel calm. Some of the world’s most talented climbers have lost their lives because they let down their guard—they got a little complacent—when things seemed to be under control. Accidents like this feel even more devastating than when loss of life results from some extreme force of nature.
Babu Chiri Sherpa started climbing as a teenager. He never attended school but taught himself to read. By age thirty-five he had reached Everest’s summit ten times (one shy of the record at the time), climbing from both the north and the south sides of the mountain. He also held two world records; in 1999 he set the record for the most time spent on the summit (he was there for more than 21 hours without supplemental oxygen), and in 2000 he set the speed record for the fastest ascent (16 hours, 56 minutes). He was known all over the world and was one of the few Sherpas sponsored by an American company (Mountain Hardwear). Many of those familiar with Babu’s accomplishments considered him one of the greatest climbers of all time.
Babu died on April 29, 2001, when he fell into a crevasse at Camp 2 while out walking around taking pictures. He was outside alone, so no one realized he was missing. His body was found the next day. It was a heartbreaking end to the life of perhaps the most celebrated Sherpa of his time. What made the accident exceptionally tragic was that it didn’t happen on a knife-edge ridge or a steep ice face or in the Khumbu Icefall. Babu was just walking around Camp 2 (Advanced Base Camp), a relatively comfortable and safe camp (compared to the camps higher up on the mountain). Everyone walks around ABC freely without much fear of, well, anything. Babu’s death rocked not only the Sherpa community but the entire climbing community. Typically bodies are not brought down from the mountain, but because Babu was one of the most accomplished and well-loved Sherpas, his body was recovered and he was given a proper burial. Babu, who had six daughters, was a huge proponent of education and dreamed of building a school in the village where he lived. That dream was realized after his death when a school was built in his honor. More than ten years after his death, he still remains an inspiration.
Avoiding complacency isn’t just about keeping yourself in check; it also means watching out for all of your teammates. It’s tempting to want to get in the zone when you climb. You have to work at finding your rhythm and timing your breaths with your steps so that you can keep a steady pace without having to stop and gasp for air. Your mind tends to wander when you’re struggling up or down the slopes of a mountain for eight, ten, or twelve hours at a time. But as a leader it’s important to stay engaged and to pay attention to the people around you, observing their behavior and taking action to keep them safe. And since everyone is in a leadership position on a climb, it’s always going to be your job to check out your climbing partners and to make sure their gear is all set and all of their equipment is in working order. Even something as simple as losing a crampon can kill a climber if it happens on a steep slope. Likewise, a harness that’s not properly buckled can come right off a climber; when that happens on high-angle terrain, it’s all over.
Marty Hoey, one of the top female climbers in the world, fell to her death during an attempt to scale Everest via a new route on the peak’s north side in 1982. She was thirty-one years old and aiming to be the first American woman to summit Everest. Marty had been a guide for thirteen years, had climbed Mount Rainier more than a hundred times, and had extensive experience on big peaks, with successful climbs of Peak Lenin (23,406 feet) in the former Soviet Union and Nanda Devi (25,634 feet) in India. After her death her climbing partners concluded that she had not fastened her harness buckle correctly, as the harness was still attached to the rope when she fell 6,000 feet down the Great Couloir on the north side of Everest. The climbers were at 26,600 feet of elevation at the time, where the frigid temperatures make dexterity a challenge and the lack of oxygen makes it hard to think clearly. Having been up that high, I can personally attest to the fact that it is very easy to think to yourself, Oh, my harness will hold just fine. The waist belt isn’t going anywhere. Marty’s team did end up making an attempt to reach the summit, but between the bad weather and their heavy hearts, the team just did not have it in them to continue to press on. Lou Whittaker, the expedition leader, said that Marty’s accident “dealt a mortal blow to our motivation. Our spirit was gone.”
Marty’s accident occurred because she had failed to rethread the end of the waist belt back through the harness buckle (known as “double-backing”). The tragedy is that this fatal error was so avoidable. Marty was an incredibly accomplished and well-respected climber, and her passing left the climbing community in a state of emotional shock. I have to believe that she is up there somewhere smiling at the number of women in the mountains these days, many of whom she inspired. I was not lucky enough to know Marty, but every time I do a harness check—on myself or on a teammate—I think of her.
Another tragedy, just as sad, just as avoidable: Todd Skinner, one of the world’s best rock climbers, died while descending a route on Leaning Tower in Yosemite National Park in California in 2006. He was forty-seven years old with a wife and three kids. He had made dozens of first ascents on some of the world’s most challenging routes. Skinner was a pioneer of “free climbing,” which is a form of rock climbing where ropes and protective hardware are used only to prevent a fall. By contrast, many climbers on difficult routes use rope or other gear as a means of moving higher on the route. But free climbers would not use any equipment to help them get past a tricky section of a rock climb.
Skinner was a legend, having completed the first free ascents of the Salathe Wall on El Capitan in Yosemite and the East Face of Trango Tower in Pakistan. He was incredibly charismatic and was in heavy demand as a motivational speaker to corporate audiences. Skinner died when the belay loop on his harness broke. A belay loop is a piece of webbing that connects the waist belt to the leg loops, and it is also where the carabiner is attached for belaying or rappelling. At some point prior to that climbing trip, Skinner had realized his belay loop was worn and had ordered a new harness, but it had not yet arrived. So he continued to climb using the old harness.
Experienced climbers know to retire a harness as soon as it shows signs of wear. Skinner knew the loop was worn yet continued to climb with it. Harnesses are neither expensive nor difficult to find. They’re easy to replace. But it’s also easy to say, “Oh, it’ll be fine for one more climb.” Sadly, Todd didn’t get one more climb. These things happen. They will continue to happen because we’re all human. But you want them to happen less often. So you look out for yourself. You look out for each other. You check each other’s crampons and you check each other’s harnesses. And then you check again.
Following the status quo is another mistake that people and businesses often fall prey to. Sometimes the masses will be zigging when the prudent thing to do is zag. And there will often be times when those around you are moving forward, but in fact the best decision for you is to stop. Different situations call for different types of actions, and as a leader it’s up to you to evaluate all the circumstances before you in order to know what your best move is. It seems obvious, I know, but many leaders fail to do it; they just follow the crowd, assuming that everyone else is doing the right thing.
The spring of 2012 marked a more difficult season on Everest than usual for a number of reasons: It was a low snow year, so the route through the Icefall was less stable than in typical seasons. The temperatures were also warmer than normal, so even at the coldest hours of 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. the Icefall represented increased danger. Debris falling from the West Ridge added yet more hazards. An avalanche that came down from Nuptse (a 25,790-foot neighboring mountain) spilled over onto Everest and hit Camp 1. The incident caused injuries, but luckily there were no fatalities. The route up the Lhotse Face, which connects Camp 2 with Camp 3, was also less stable than usual, with significant (and potentially lethal) rockfall coming from higher up on the mountain. It’s bad enough worrying that someone’s water bottle will careen down the Lhotse Face and kill or critically injure you, but adding to that the higher-than-usual rockfall danger makes that stretch of the route even more treacherous. Things got so bad on the Lhotse Face that sections of the route had to be shifted midseason to reduce the risk to the climbers.
Good leadership can also mean retreating when necessary. Russell Brice, one of the most well-known and experienced expedition leaders on Everest, made one of the boldest and controversial decisions during the 2012 spring climbing season when he called off his expedition five weeks into the trip. That decision meant that no one on his team got a shot at the summit. On the Himex website, Brice summed up his decision to pull the plug on his expedition: “The danger [on the peak this season] is certainly past my parameters.”
Imagine putting months, perhaps years, into training for an Everest expedition—and then all of a sudden it is game over because some guy makes a decision on your behalf. Think about what goes into making an Everest climb a reality: taking out a loan, perhaps mortgaging your house, raising the sponsorship money (or writing a check for the cost of the trip if you are able), buying or borrowing all of the required gear, getting the time off from work (with no pay), spending five weeks busting your butt on the mountain… and then not getting your shot at the top—and not because you weren’t strong enough or because you got a respiratory infection or a gastrointestinal infection or because your equipment malfunctioned or because you got hypothermia or frostbite or you sprained your ankle or you broke your ribs or fractured your wrist when you fell off a ladder or because the weather was bad and who the hell expected a storm so early in the day when the weather reports looked clear or because your great-aunt Gladys died and you had to leave the trip early to go to her funeral in Des Moines—but because your expedition leader pulled the plug on your trip. Total bullsh*t, right? Wrong.
As a leader, Brice’s job is to keep his climbing team and his Sherpas safe and out of harm’s way. That is priority numero uno. Because Brice did not feel the conditions in the Icefall and on the Lhotse Face were conducive to (reasonably) safe climbing, he told everyone the expedition was ending early and they were to pack up and head home. No one got refunds; the money they paid had already been spent on permits, Sherpa salaries, equipment, food, oxygen, and so on, but he did promise them a discount if they wanted to come back and try again another year.
The level of disappointment among the climbers on Brice’s expedition had to be painfully high, but I think he did the right thing. Brice himself would not have climbed Everest in those conditions, and therefore he was not comfortable sending his team up the mountain. I admire him for making such a tough call knowing it could very well affect future business, since climbers might have been hesitant to sign on to one of his upcoming trips. Brice made a decision that he knew could hurt him financially, but he was acting in what he believed was in the best interests of his climbing team and his Sherpas.
That’s what good leaders do—they always look out for their people first. The easy thing to do would have been for him to just let the expedition proceed as planned. But he was the expedition leader; people were relying on him (and paying him) to make good decisions, and he made the best one he could based on the information he had at the time. And while the climbers might not have been happy with his decision, they respected him for doing what he thought was best for his team. It took some brass, for sure.
Would it have been the right call for every expedition? Certainly not. These types of decisions all come down to an individual leader’s level of risk tolerance, which varies from person to person. Leaders should never expect the people on their teams to take any risks that they would not be willing to take themselves. Brice’s decision to leave the mountain was the right decision for him. The other leaders who chose to stay made the right decisions as well.
The year 2012 turned out to be a particularly deadly one on Everest, with ten fatalities. In addition to the poor route conditions, another contributing factor was that the predicted window of good weather that climbers look for in order to judge when it is “safest” to go for the summit was forecasted to arrive later in the season than normal. This resulted in large numbers of people going for the top on the few decent weather days, and the bottlenecks on the way to the summit caused issues.
The CBS Evening News did a story (as did every media outlet, it seemed) on the fatalities that season, and a reporter from the show interviewed me about what went wrong on the mountain. Most of the footage from my interview ended up on the cutting room floor, so when the segment aired it didn’t reflect my views on the issues of the 2012 climbing season. I believe the media got it wrong, focusing almost entirely on the “overcrowding” on the mountain with little or no mention of the other issues that contributed to the higher-than-normal death rate.
The problems that occurred in 2012 didn’t come about because Everest was a lot more crowded than usual. The issue was that there were fewer days where the weather was cooperative, so everyone wanted to take a shot at the top during those few precious days. Had there been more days of predicted good weather, the stories of the 2012 season would have been different. There have definitely been seasons on Everest with more fatalities, but 2012 garnered quite a bit of media attention due to social media and the advanced communication systems now available, which can bring blogs, photos, and videos right from the mountain into your living room in real time.
There was a lot of debate about what went wrong on Everest in 2012. Was it the crowds? The narrow weather window? Global warming’s impact on the terrain? Everyone in the climbing community, armchair mountaineers, and the media seemed to have different opinions about what caused the deaths and injuries on Everest. Regardless, Russell Brice’s decision stands out as a gutsy and wise call, made for the right reasons: keeping his people—the Sherpas that he employed as well as the climbers who were with him that season—as safe as possible.
Complacency comes in many forms: doing something because everyone around you is doing it, or going through the motions out of habit. It can be characterized by not preparing, not making a move, not moving fast enough, or not being agile enough. Ironically, complacency is a risk that skyrockets when things are going well—when you feel safe enough. But it’s not just adventurers in extreme environments who have to watch out for complacency—businesses can also do themselves in if they aren’t able to adjust to the shifts in their environment. For example, take a look at Ford.
Ford was a company that at one point suffered from damaging complacency but was able to turn things around and come back from the brink. In the mid-to late 1990s the stock market was raging and fuel prices were low. Ford was flying high. They had acquired luxury brands Jaguar and Aston Martin and offered a diverse range of cars that would appeal to just about any demographic. But once the twenty-first century rolled in, things started to slide due to rising fuel prices, an unstable economy, and the high cost of legacy health care. But Ford continued to operate as it had in the previous decade, and as a result they did themselves a lot of damage.
When Allan Mulally left Boeing and took the helm of Ford in September 2006, the automaker barely had a pulse and was heading for a $17 billion loss in profits. Mulally knew he had to make some big moves in order to keep the company alive. He closed manufacturing plants, chopped thousands of jobs (ouch), and dumped Ford’s luxury brands—adios, Jaguar, Land Rover, and Aston Martin (although Ford retained a small percentage of ownership in Aston Martin). Layoffs and the discontinuation of high-end brands don’t exactly scream “growth,” but the car industry was shifting, and Ford had to shift, too.
Mulally’s decision to take the company in that direction was a sign that he knew they had to move quickly to eventually emerge as a better, stronger, and more agile company. He had to get rid of the corporate complacency. It worked. By 2009 the company was profitable again. The ascent continued: in 2011 Ford’s net income was more than $20 billion, and more than 41,000 hourly wage workers received an extra $6,200 each through the profit-sharing plan. In July 2012 Ford announced they would be creating 12,000 new jobs. The company believes that by 2015, they will be producing 8 million vehicles a year (up from 5.53 million in 2008).
No discussion of complacency in the business world would be complete without a mention of Research in Motion (RIM), maker of the BlackBerry smartphone. RIM was founded in 1984, and its technology put mobile e-mail on the map. By 2008 the company was valued at more than $80 billion. By 2012 it was valued at less than $5 billion. RIM failed to adapt to the changing smartphone market. They didn’t anticipate the wide acceptance of touchscreens, and even as these touchscreens gained in popularity by leaps and bounds, RIM still dismissed the demand for the technology. They kept thinking that the advantages of their physical keyboard (called a QWERTY keyboard) would keep customers coming back. It didn’t. Web browsing and downloadable apps—who needs that? Um, everyone.
At one point RIM controlled approximately 50 percent of the smartphone market. But into their third decade, their market share was hovering somewhere between 2 and 7 percent. They failed to adapt to the shifting landscape in their industry. RIM came out with a new device in 2013, and as of this writing the jury is still out on whether they will make a comeback. (I‘m rooting for them, as I am a QWERTY keyboard fan.) But they’re learning the hard way that it’s a lot more difficult to regain market share than to keep it in the first place. They’ll have to find some serious momentum, because Apple and Google, two companies very adept at innovating, will continue to advance their products and platforms, so as soon as RIM launches the next-generation BlackBerry, they better be ready to look at what they need to do next to stay competitive in a fast-moving, ever-changing industry. Perhaps their board of directors needs a trip through the Khumbu Icefall to remind them of the dangers of complacency.