Leader on the Edge

Information is power. Diversity is strength. Complacency is death. Some aphorisms about leadership and teamwork get repeated endlessly, and yet they still seem abstract -- especially within the safe, temperature-controlled confines of cubicles, conference rooms, and airport departure lounges. But for Robert Swan, a modern-day explorer and environmentalist, such aphorisms have a vivid immediacy -- perhaps because he learned them under some of the most extreme conditions in the world. The first person to walk to both the North Pole and the South Pole, Swan understands -- deeply, personally, and urgently -- what it means to set goals, to take risks, and to succeed when success doesn't just seem like a matter of life or death. Having navigated the largely uncharted territory of the Arctic and the Antarctic, Swan now helps businesspeople at such companies as Merrill Lynch, Frito-Lay, and IBM to navigate the uncharted territory of the new economy. Swan has become one of the world's top motivational speakers, yet his work with the business community doesn't stop when the auditorium lights come on. His most recent project involves taking executives and other businesspeople on sailing expeditions to the South Pole, where they learn firsthand about principles of leadership, teamwork, and communication -- and about the environmental problems facing not only Antarctica, but the entire world.

Lots of leaders say that they understand the power of sharing information as widely as possible. Swan has built expeditions around that principle. "In my business," he says, "if only one person in a group knows how to navigate, and he or she gets sick, we're going to get lost. So somebody else on the team has to understand navigation and to work with the navigator. And at the South Pole, there aren't any signposts. If you miss the pole by five miles, you won't ever know it's there."

Lots of leaders claim to understand that success in a demanding, fast-changing world requires persistence as well as brilliance. Swan, now 43, embodies that principle. "It's all very well to have a dream," he says. "But eventually you've got to make that dream a reality. I started by saying, 'I'm going to walk to the South Pole' -- and at the time, I'd never even been camping! But, like any other 20-year-old, I thought I could raise $5 million in a few months and then head off to the Antarctic. The reality was that it took seven years to raise that money -- seven years of working as a taxi driver, a tree cutter, a gardener, and a hotel dishwasher. But I hung on to my dream. Personal leadership -- the belief that I could make something happen -- is the key to my story."

To the Bottom of the Earth

It was on his first expedition to Antarctica, in 1986, that Swan learned about some of the factors that ensure a project's success. He and his fellow explorers, Gareth Wood and Roger Mear, set off on foot on an 883-mile trek from Ross Island to the South Pole. Their "unassisted" journey -- they were without dogs, radios, or any other means of communication with the rest of the world -- took them through a place that can be described only with superlatives. Swan has called Antarctica "the last wilderness." It has also been called "the most forbidding place on Earth" and "the highest, darkest, driest, coldest, and windiest continent on the planet." A desert as dry as Death Valley, inland Antarctica is a place where it never rains and where it almost never snows. The continent measures 14.25 million square kilometers (5.5 million square miles) -- that's almost twice the size of Australia -- but it has a year-round population of only about 1,200.

Swan's goal -- an obsession since he was 11 years old -- was to follow the route taken by Robert Falcon Scott. In 1912, while attempting to be the first explorer to reach the South Pole, Scott had arrived three weeks after a Norwegian team and had then either frozen or starved to death on his return journey. To honor Scott's memory, Swan wanted to replicate that trip -- without having it end in failure and tragedy.

For Swan, Wood, and Mear, survival hinged on, among other things, trusting one another absolutely. One test of trust arose roughly 6,000 times -- whenever it was necessary to cross a crevasse. "You'd have two or three feet of snow above an opening that's several hundred feet deep," remembers Swan. "If you've got 6,000 of these suckers to cross in 900 miles, you can't have a review session and start giving feedback every time you encounter one. This is the time to trust. We took turns being in front, and whoever was leading chose the route we took. The other two followed unconditionally. If we had stopped every time to have a five-minute debate, we'd still be there now."