"Gareth Wood is a perfectionist. He has ten thousand checklists, one for every five minutes of his life. That's very, very difficult to live with -- the rest of us were perfectly happy to sit in chaos -- but absolutely essential. If equipment breaks on a polar journey, you're dead. If your stove doesn't work and you can't melt ice for water, you die from dehydration in four days. If your tent rips during a hurricane, you die in a week. But thanks to constant checking, constant list making, and constant attention to detail, nothing broke. And Gareth made sure that things were right in the first place. He'd taken our tent into wind tunnels at testing stations and blasted the hell out of the thing for months."

Swan was the front man. "I don't give a shit about detail," he says. "My job was to raise money and to inspire people to support us. We would not have gotten to Antarctica unless I had done that."

The overarching lesson that Swan learned from his first polar expedition -- a lesson that has been reinforced on subsequent trips -- was less a pragmatic tip than a philosophy that has expanded to fill his entire life. In a phrase, that philosophy is "Why not try?"

"People who lead companies will say, 'Our objective is to become the number-one digital corporation,' but they feel helpless about violence and pollution," Swan argues. "These people can turn their skills and their technology into solutions for the planet's survival. Maybe it's going to take a major catastrophe to shock them into action. But the solutions do lie with business. So why not try?"

Curtis Sittenfeld (csittenfeld@yahoo.com) is a former Fast Company staff writer. She recently began a new stage in the exploration of her own career -- by enrolling in the Iowa Writers' Workshop. For more information on Robert Swan, visit the Web (www.robertswan.org) or contact him by email (swan@icetalk.co.uk).

Sidebar: Postcard from the Edge

Who: Jeremy Topple

Age: 34

Job: Consultant, BUPA

Expedition: Mission Antarctica, February 1999

"Coming into Ushuaia, Argentina, we flew in over the mountains. I'd never seen anything like them before: They looked wild, prehistoric. I felt like I was at the bottom of the Earth. In Ushuaia, they call it 'world's end.' We stepped out into a small airport, and Hamish Laird, our skipper, was there to greet us. It was a brilliantly sunny day, and for the first time in a long while, I felt, 'This is the start of something I've never done before.' "

"We took a taxi to a small, wooden jetty, and we saw the two-mile-wide Beagle Canal. There were mountains on both sides, and there was quite a strong wind blowing. We got our bags out of the taxi and looked at the ice-sailing yacht, a 54-foot-long metal boat, and I just felt so insignificant. I thought, 'This isn't right. This isn't safe.' But gradually, you come to terms with a scale of nature that you're usually insulated from. You go from fear to elation: It's clear that you're alive, that this is really happening, that you're doing something very different, and that it's beautiful."

Who: David Laing

Age: 31

Job: Works full-time on Mission Antarctica project for Standard Life (previous job: investment-presentations designer, Standard Life)

Expedition: Mission Antarctica, December 1997 - January 1998

"Just before we left South America, I said to Robert Swan, 'Something has been puzzling me: Why did you pick me for this trip?' He said, 'It's unusual for me to meet someone as mad as I am.' I took that as a compliment because one of Robert's favorite things to say is 'If you do enough mad things, you'll have a magic moment.' "

"One of my magic moments began with a question: How many pieces of clothing should you -- and can you -- wear in the Antarctic? When we were on King George Island and it was about minus-10 degrees Celsius [14 degrees Fahrenheit], I completely stripped off everything I was wearing -- and then put on each item one by one. After putting on each layer, I got someone to take a photograph of me. When Robert heard that I'd done this, he just stared at me as if I were completely nuts. The answer to that question, by the way, is 23 articles of clothing -- including sunglasses."

Who: Adrian Cross

Age: 47

Job: Account consultant, Standard Life

Expedition: Mission Antarctica, February 1999

"The Drake Passage is one of the world's most horrific bodies of water. People say that at 40 degrees south, you're in the 'Roaring 40s'; that at 50 degrees south, you're in the 'Screaming 50s'; and that at 60 degrees south, there are no rules and there is no God. On the way down, we were treated extremely well, but on the way back, we got hit very badly."