Leadership Lessons of a Rock Climber

With that change in psychology, I managed to climb through to the top of the route. It caused quite a sensation and confused many of the best climbers of the day. They were still climbing in 1979, whereas I had psychologically transported myself to 1994. And, indeed, by the early 1990s, these same elite climbers climbed Genesis routinely, no longer thinking of it as particularly hard. One climber from England--a much stronger lad than me--even climbed it in his tennis shoes!

Changing our frame of mind carries over to all walks of life, particularly for entrepreneurs and visionary company builders. The key is to recognize underlying patterns, often with the benefit of historical perspective, and then to project forward what those patterns will mean for future generations. When Steve Jobs visited the Xerox PARC research facilities in 1979, he saw a bunch of desktop computers using point-and-click devices and screens that displayed exactly what would be printed on the actual page, formatting and all. Today, we take this for granted. I'm typing these words, while looking at a display that will print exactly as I see it, and I can move around the page using a mouse. But in 1979, no commercial computers--certainly not personal computers--had these capabilities. Jobs recognized immediately that these innovations would one day be taken for granted. He pictured how computers would be viewed 10 or 20 years down the road, when these features would be standard fare for even low-cost producers.

Instead of waiting for the world to make this shift, however, Jobs decided to act as if the world had already changed. And in 1984, the Macintosh computer was released, long before the natural forces of the market would have required such a device. It caused quite a sensation, stunning stronger and better companies such as IBM. But today, of course, we think nothing of these features. Jobs had simply stepped forward in time and built his company's next-generation computers with this changed frame of mind.

Climbing teaches that the biggest barriers are not on the rock but in our minds. We fail to go to fallure because we break mentally. We fail to take risks because we confuse probability and consequence, yet we become sloppy when the probabilities of falling are low (and senselessly risk all). And in perhaps the biggest failure, we allow today's frame of mind to limit our creativity and capabilities. What we perceive as limits today will simply be viewed as stepping-stones to the ultimate limits of the next generation. So, why not join the next generation now, and step right on past the limits of today? Why wait?

Daniel Boorstin argued in his classic book The Discoverers (Random House, 1985) that the primary barrier to progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge and expertise. Discoverers see more clearly what can be done because they have less knowledge about the way things are supposed to work and are not trapped by the limits of their times. Similarly, climbing teaches that breakthroughs come not primarily by changing what we do, but by changing first and foremost how we think about what we do. And that is the toughest climb of all.

Adapted from Upward Bound: Nine Original Accounts of How Business Leaders Reached Their Summits. Edited by Michael Useem, Jerry Useem, and Paul Asel, published by Crown Publishing Group (2003).

Jim Collins is author of Good to Great (HarperCollins, 2001) and coauthor of Built to Last (HarperBusiness, 1994). He is a self-employed professor who endowed his own chair and granted himself tenure. He still climbs three to four days a week.