High Altitude Leadership: What the World's Most Forbidding Peaks Teach Us About Success
Chris Warner, Don Schmincke
If you've been around the organizational world for a while there is nothing in this book that you haven't already heard a thousand times - perseverance, the danger of the status quo, courage, etc., etc. What's new is the venue for the lessons - mountaintops around the globe. The authors use tales of mountaineering to weave in their 'high altitude' leadership skills. At first I found this very compelling, but by the end of the book I found myself skimming the stories which had all begun to sound alike: "From base camp we began the ascent....." Again, the lessons provided by the authors are certainly valid and unquestionably important, but they are timeless principles and you won't find anything new in this volume.
I also found this book uncomfortably xenophobic at points. In virtually all of the tales from the world's tallest peaks you find Americans rescuing or shepherding people of other nationalities who have made poor and sometimes unethical decisions that endanger others. The 'non-Ameicans' are often cast in a very unfavorable light and while the stories are most likely true I don't think identifying the nationalities of the guilty serves to advance the book's core premise. I found it distracting.
