Leadership Lessons from Adventurer and Environmentalist Rick Ridgeway

Welcome to HBR on leadership Case studies and conversations with the world's top business and management experts hand selected to help you unlock the best in those around you. Mountains are often used as metaphors for the challenges that arise in business and leadership. But when Rick Ridgway compares mountaineering to risk management, he's speaking from deep experience, navigating both the boardroom and some of the world's highest slopes. Ridgway is an outdoor adventurer, writer, and advocate for sustainability and conservation initiatives, and he's also the former vice president of Environmental Initiatives at Patagonia. In this episode, Ridgway explains why good communication, ambitious goal setting, and meticulous planning are essential in both mountaineering and and business. He also emphasizes the importance of recruiting a strong team, whether you're leading an uphill battle to make apparel manufacturing more sustainable or summiting K2. Spoiler alert. Ridgeway has done both. This episode originally aired on HBR IdeaCast in August 2011. And just a note, we recorded this by phone. While the audio quality is not great, the conversation is. I think you'll enjoy it. Here it is.

Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Greene. Nature can be a great teacher, if sometimes an unforgiving one. Some of our best leaders have learned what they know from her, and today we're talking about nature as the ultimate leadership development program and the kind of leadership we'll need to protect our natural resources for the future. I'm on the phone with Rick Ridgway, Patagonia's Vice president of environmental initiatives. He's well known for his summits of the world's highest mountains, adventures he's recounted in books that have become classics. He's the co author of an article about the future of sustainability coming up in the October issue of our magazine. Rick, thanks so much for talking with us today.

Oh, you're welcome. Great to be here.

So business these days has become a kind of extreme environment. It's extremely competitive, extremely volatile, extremely demanding. Earlier in your career, you spent a lot of time in actual extreme environments. Are there lessons you draw on now that you learned on the mountain?

Yeah, the main lesson that I brought back to my sea level endeavors from the world's highest places probably include tenacity above everything. Now, I don't want to overstate that. I think that mountaineers, successful mountaineers anyway, are probably born with a high quotient of tenacity. You wouldn't lean that direction in the first place. But when you're up on a big climb and the outcome is anything but certain, but you stick to your plan. You put one foot in front of the other, and you stick with it day after day, week after week, sometimes on the big climbs, month after month, and you pull it off. Then you get a lot of reinforcement for the tenacity you had to bring to the project in the first place. So that certainly informed my business life as well. And being able to draw out a roadmap to achieve a goal and then stick with it and simply never give up to in the first place, pick a goal that at the outset might even seem quixotic or impossible, but then, you know, just through never giving up, never giving in, reaching your goal is. That's definitely something that I brought down from the high mountains.

I think that the thrill of setting the goal and then achieving it, especially really ambitious goal, is something that probably leaders in any setting can relate to. Specifically with regard to leadership, did leading expeditions teach you about leading people in a general business setting?

Yes. There's a lot of common ground between mountaineering and leading a business team towards a successful goal as well. Obviously, each have a very specific goal, and in expedition climbing, as in business, each have teams with a lot of people that all have their individual aspirations. And, you know, you definitely got to work together to maintain the harmony of the team towards the goal. Obviously, in both areas, it's never very easy. But again, I think that quality of tenacity informs even the teamwork part, because inevitably you're going to get a lot of disagreement. And inevitably, disagreements can only be harmonized through a lot of good communication. And you just have to be able to stick at it, to remain positive again, to never give up. But positive attitude's definitely part of it as well. I'll give you an example. The hardest climb I had in my career was the first American ascent of K2. And we were the first team that successfully climbed the second highest mountain in the world without using supplemental oxygen. And from the arrival at the base of the mountain to the Summit, it took 68 days, and we faced six major storms. And with each one, we had to come down and retreat to the base and wait for the good weather to return and go back up again. And we would have never pulled that off if we hadn't all been just committed to sticking with it to the very end and also committed to working with each other until finally we could, as a team, reach our goal.

So you mentioned in your response the dangers of conflict, and I want to talk a little bit about the importance of getting around conflict. And about persuasion, because I think that seems to be something you're really good at. And I know at least historically, arguing for sustainability in business has involved a lot of convincing high powered people of the merits of doing something they don't want to do. So how do you go about doing that?

Well, it begins with picking the right people to join your team in the first place. Everybody knows that. But people often forget that that's absolutely the most important initial step. In the Harvard article, we talk about several trends in sustainability that are currently merging. And one of the most significant ones is a trend started in the apparel sector to align companies around the common goal of developing a uniform tool for measuring environmental and social labor impact of manufacturing products. And that coalition in the apparel sector is achieving phenomenal results. And it's doing it very quickly, but it's doing it because we were very careful to invite into the group in the beginning companies that would be most willing to reach the goals. Now, along the way, there are myriad almost daily moments where you have people that want to go in different directions and you just have to remind them of the goals that we all agreed to in the first place. And then you have to, in reminding them, sort of appease their higher, loftier ambitions, remind them that we're only going to get there if we all work together. And that's just the conversations you have. But again, it begins with picking the right people in the first place. Doesn't matter if it's mountaineering or business. And again, that sounds like a platitude. We all know that. But how often do we all forget how prominently important that is?

I think, you know, you raise a good point about the sort of importance of these coalitions and partnerships, whether it's bringing multiple companies together or just bringing multiple people together to be on your team, you know, inside one company. I think though, that these sort of coalitions of the willing, to borrow a phrase, it seems like they can only go so far. So what kind of leadership does the broader sustainability movement need if they're going to make ground? Maybe with some people who aren't always willing, can they convince people to partner with them?

Well, the important thing to understand is that the willing, the pool of people who are willing to roll up their sleeves and accomplish sustainability goals, is increasing quickly. So perhaps a more interesting question is to ask, you know, why are there more willing people now than there were a very short time ago? And it's because increasingly everyone is starting to sense this threat that we all have in common, that we are doing business well beyond our planet's ability to sustain our own businesses, both in environmental and in social labor impacts. And if we don't do anything about it, that it could in fact jeopardize our businesses. So we at Patagonia have recognized that for a number of years. And the epiphanous experience for me was when we were invited in early 2007 to attend in Paris the announcement of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's latest findings, the UN Commission that was chartered to assess the impacts of business and other human endeavors on our planet. And there were 500 people in attendance in the Elsay Palace. Leaders from many of the world's largest corporations, ministers and presidents from most of the world's governments, and high representatives from its religious and NGO constituencies. And they all heard together the warnings, and they were all together for the first time in a room, in my experience, experienced them in common. And there was a concern, even a palpable fear amongst everybody. And we knew that that fear was also a great opportunity. So that the opportunity was to bring these multi constituencies together who were all recognizing that if we didn't work together, we're all in trouble together. And we changed our course at our company to, again, instead of pursuing a politics of confrontation, to rather look at collaboration as the best tool moving forward. So that Apparel Coalition that I referenced earlier is a multi stakeholder endeavor. It is bringing together not just companies who are willing, but NGOs and government agencies and universities and academics as well.

So it sounds like to me, I have to say, listening to you talk about what you've been doing with Patagonia and the Apparel Coalition, it sounds, I have to say, like you're living the dream. I mean, you have a job that lets you pursue an issue you're passionate about. You're having an impact. Part of the reason I like working for HBR is, you know, I want everyone to be able to feel that way about what they do as their work. But I think some people may listen to that and think, oh, well, that's great for him, but, you know, I can't climb K2 and I can't do that either. If there are people who are listening who might like to have that kind of job, that really feels. It sounds like more like a calling, you know, what would you tell them?

Well, you have to visualize where you want to go and who you want to be. That's the first step. And then just keep your ear to the wind for, you know, any opportunity that might lead you that way. And Then, of course, proactively try to pursue the opportunities that you identify as well. It's a combination of the two things. You just can't wait for it to happen. You've got to mold your own future as well. But they both go together, side by side. But the most important thing is to just know that as an individual, you want to make a difference. The other important thing is to know that you're going to fail. If you wake up in the morning and stretch your arms and say, okay, today I'm going to go out there and save the world, you can't do that. But if you get up, stretch your arms and say, you know, I'm going to work today to save some very small, focused, discreet part of it, you can do that.

So you mentioned the possibility that you will fail if you bite off more than you can chew. And that sort of got me thinking about failure. We did a whole issue this spring on failure and learning from failure and the importance of making mistakes and learning from them. And that just makes me wonder. You know, we talked in the beginning about nature being a great teacher. Is there a mistake that you've made or a moment that you've had that you made a mistake, but you learned from it and it left you stronger than you were before?

Yeah. I've turned back on many climbs, as any mountaineer who's gained my age has done, and I feel as good about those as I do about the successes. But I've made a few mistakes, and I made some that have nearly cost me my life. And I made one where we triggered an avalanche in 1980 that did kill my best friend.

Oh, my God.

Injured my other colleagues with me, and we had to bury my friend on the side of the mountain and go home licking our wounds. And I did learn a lot from that, that mountaineering is about risk management. It's not about taking heedless risks, but it's about managing risks so that they even go away. And that's what you need to do. You need to identify the risks just as carefully as you can. And in mountaineering, that management of risk is a great satisfaction, a great source of gratification. But I said at the beginning that mountaineering also teaches you to identify goals that at the outset, seem impossible, if not perhaps even quicksighting. But you still need a roadmap on how you're going to get there. You need in your heart of hearts to have the confidence in yourself that you're going to pull it off if you just stick with it. If you are careful not to take a risk that is too foolish.

Well, and it's easy to see how that would help you keep things in perspective, you know, experiences like that. And I think as you're also talking about managing risk, not taking foolish risks, and a willingness to take on quixotic goals, I think it's also easy to see how that's useful in what you're doing in the sustainability space.

Absolutely. But at the end of the day, the most important opportunity, the biggest opportunity we have in front of us all, is the one I mentioned earlier, that now, for the first time ever, we are all gaining increased visibility over what is a very dire future if we don't collectively get together to figure out how to reduce our impact on this one planet that we have. Hmm.

Rick, thanks again so much for talking with us today.

Yeah, my great pleasure.

That was Rick Ridgway in conversation with Sarah Greene on the HBR IdeaCast. Ridgway is an outdoor adventurer, writer and advocate for sustainability and conservation initiatives, and he's the former Vice President of Environmental Initiatives at Patagonia. We'll be back next Wednesday with another handpicked conversation about leadership from the Harvard Business Review. If you found this episode helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues and follow our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. While you're there, be sure to leave us a review when you're ready for more podcasts, articles, case studies, books and videos with the world's top business and management experts, you'll find it all@hbr.org this episode was produced by Ann Sani and me, Hannah Bates. Ian Fox is our editor and music by Coma Media. Special thanks to Maureen Hoch, Nicole Smith, Erica Truxler, Ramsey Kabaz, Anne Bartholomew, and you, our listener. See you next week.

Sam.