Leadership Lessons of a Rock Climber

Failure and fallure. The difference is subtle, but it is all the difference in the world. In fallure, you still do not get up the route, but you never let go. In fallure you fall; in failure you let go. Going to fallure means full commitment to go up--even if the odds of success are less than 20%, 10%, or even 5%. You leave nothing in reserve, no mental or physical resource untapped. In fallure, you never give yourself a psychological out: "Well, I didn't really give it everything. . . . I might have made it with my best effort." In fallure, you always give your full best--despite the fear, pain, lactic acid, and uncertainty. To the outside observer, failure and fallure look similar (you fly through the air in both cases), but the inner experience of fallure is totally different from that of failure.

You'll only find your true limit when you go to fallure, not failure. Sure, I had less than a 20% chance of pulling through to the crystal ball, but because I let go, I'll never know for sure. Perhaps I would have had an extra reserve; perhaps I would have surprised myself and had an extra bit of power to hang on for one more move. Or perhaps--and this turned out to be true--the very next hold is better than it looks. And that's the rub. On an on-sight--as with life--you don't know what the next hold feels like. It's the ambiguity--about the holds, the moves, the ability to clip the rope--that makes 100% commitment on an on-sight so difficult.

One of my mentors in life, the design guru Sara Little Turnbull, gave me a wall hanging with a quote from her speech at the 1992 Corporate Design Foundation Conference:

If you don't
Stretch
You don't know
Where the edge
Is

Turnbull, director of the Stanford University Process of Change Laboratory, built a distinguished career as a design consultant to corporations such as Corning and 3M. The Corporate Design Foundation described Turnbull as "CEOs' secret weapon in product design development." Turnbull told me that some of her best designs came when she was on the brink of a failed concept but refused to let go.

Of course, many--indeed, most--of her brink-of-failure designs ended up being failures. But every once in a while, by not letting go, she would push herself to a completely different level, and something extraordinary would come about. "And that's when breakthroughs happen," she told me. "You have to be on the brink of failure and then surprise yourself. You just go to a different level." Fallure, not failure.

In researching great companies, I've noticed how the best executives intuitively understood this idea. As CEO of Kimberly-Clark, Darwin Smith made a fallure-versus-failure decision in vaulting his company to greatness. For 100 years, Kimberly-Clark languished in mediocrity, with most of its business in traditional paper mills. Smith realized that the company's best shot at greatness lay in the paper-based consumer-goods arena, where it had a side business called Kleenex--a brand that had become a category, like Coke or Xerox. Like the general who burned the boats upon landing, leaving no retreat for his soldiers, Smith decided to sell the traditional mills. He even sold the mill in Kimberly, Wisconsin, and threw all the proceeds into the consumer business, going head-to-head with such rivals as Scott Paper and Procter & Gamble. Wall Street derided him, the business media called the move stupid, and the analysts wrote merciless commentary. But in the end, Smith's decision paid off, and Kimberly-Clark became the number-one paper-based consumer-products company in the world.

In climbing jargon, Smith removed the ability to "take" (to tell your belayer to pull the rope tight and catch you in a controlled fall, as I did with Matt when I failed on Crystal Ball). Of course, there was no guarantee that Kimberly-Clark would succeed in the consumer business--it could have taken a huge leader fall--but Smith understood the only path to success lay in a full commitment to climb to fallure.

I now see life as a series of choices between going to failure or fallure. As in an on-sight attempt, the next hold in life remains unclear, ambiguous. And that very ambiguity keeps us back from making a fully committed attempt. We fail mentally. We let go. We take a nice, controlled fall, rather than risking a bigger fall. But as with most hard sport climbs, going to fallure in life is scary, but not dangerous. Whether it be starting a business or publishing a book or trying an exciting new design, fallure rarely means doom. And most important, the only way to find your true limit is to go to fallure, not failure.

At age 45, my body does not allow me to pull as hard on holds as when I was 20. But I've since learned that what you lose in physical strength you can gain by increasing your mental strength. And so, I continue to work in the realm of overhanging rock, trying to go to fallure.

I've even redefined "success" less in terms of getting to the top and more in terms of the quality of my mental effort. During a recent climbing session, I did not get up a single route. Not one. Still, it was one of my most successful days of climbing ever, because I went to fallure on every attempt. I felt good on the way home because my mind felt strong that day, compared to the weak feeling on most days. For in the end, climbing is not about conquering the rock; it is about conquering yourself. And this is what fallure is all about.

Of course, there are times when climbing to fallure wouldn't be valiant but just plain stupid--which brings us to the next lesson.