by Will Dean
Randy lost most of his sight at age twenty-two in 1989 to a rare neurological disease, and he went completely blind in 2000. Later, the same disease attacked his spine, and by 2006 he was wheelchair-bound. A radical course of therapy over the course of two years helped him to walk again, but not content with walking, he subsequently ran four marathons and twice climbed the forty-eight mountains over four thousand feet in his native New Hampshire. In 2016, with his guide dog Quinn, he reached the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro.
Among all these incredible achievements, however, for sheer drama nothing can compete with the moment when Pierce stood on the high platform of the King of the Swingers obstacle and reached out to locate the trapeze bar with his white stick. You reach that platform above a pool of water by climbing thirty stairs. The trapeze bar is eight feet away from the platform edge, and Mudders must leap to grab it. If they do, they then swing the full arc of the trapeze to ring a bell before dropping into the cold water below. Only about ten percent of Mudders catch the bar and swing far enough to ring a bell. Thinking about all those things, Randy stood on that platform and reached out for the trapeze bar with his white stick and prepared to jump.
Speaking about it now, he traces the courage to be up there at all back to something he was told a couple of weeks after blindness struck all those years ago.
When he got the news that his sight could not be saved, Randy was only a year out of college. He loved his job designing the hardware for communication products, he was heavily involved in sports, and felt as if his life was just beginning. Then just as suddenly it seemed like it had come to a full stop.
“When I went into the hospital, I was very gregarious, very exuberant,” he says. “But it very quickly became clear that they weren’t going to make me better. And somewhere in there I changed my manner and withdrew. I got bitter and angry. One day, after a couple of weeks of this, a nurse got me a day pass, and she and her husband took me out on a boat on a waterway nearby. It was Memorial Day. She said there was something she needed to tell me, but that her colleagues didn’t think I was ready to hear it, which was why she had taken me out of the hospital. She said it pretty bluntly, and I’ll never forget her words. She said, ‘Randy, you aren’t the same person who came in here. When you came in here you were so full of life we all wanted to do everything possible to help you, but right now, if we were to meet you for the first time, we would not have any motivation to try to give you that extra assistance. If you could find the person you were, people are always going to want to be a part of your life. If you can’t ever find that person again, you are going to lose all the support that could help you do anything you want in this world. That would be a waste because you had an awful lot of potential when you came in here.’”
It was a tough thing to hear, but Randy never forgot that lesson. From that moment on he vowed never to let blindness—or bitterness about his blindness—define him. He would instead see it as a challenge and an opportunity to find new possibilities in his life. “I felt disabled and therefore was disabled, not because of my blindness but because of my inappropriate mental response,” he says. “It took a little bit of time for me to say ‘Hey, I’m the one limiting myself,’ but gradually I realized that if I found ways to solve problems, I could still be the man I was always meant to be.”
He realized the best argument against “you can’t do that” was always just to do it. He used karate, in bouts against sighted fighters, to improve his focus and awareness, and eventually earned a black belt. He relearned basketball and baseball and football. And then, after his spine was damaged, he relearned how to walk.
The spine injury affected Randy’s balance, but he found the quicker he moved forward, the more chance he had of staying upright. He had lost all feeling below the knee, but with the help of a guide dog and a gyroscope on his tongue to help his balance, he worked out how to run by “feeling the ground through his thighs.” And he also developed a taste for heights.
Randy’s mountain-climbing experience had been crucial when he attempted Tough Mudder. He did his first event in 2014 in New England, running with a team of five friends.
One of the consequences of Randy’s blindness is that he has had to get used to sometimes being helped. One of the things he loved about Tough Mudder was that he got to give plenty of help too. “I’m six foot four and I’m strong, so when we are coming up to obstacles where people need a lift, Berlin Walls, Pyramid Scheme, I’m a great booster. I believe positive people accomplish things. I’m independent and strong willed, so taking help is something that took a while for me to accept. But now I know how I feel when I get to help somebody—I realize if I let somebody help me, I’m letting them get that good feeling too. What a gift I am giving them!”
When Randy got up the steps to the platform of King of the Swingers, there were friends around him, but this time he was very much on his own, about to leap into thin air to try to catch something he couldn’t see. There is a viral video that captures the moment. “If you look on the video you can see I use my stick so I can actually point my toes at the outer edges of the bar I have to grab hold of to keep my bearings,” he says. “The other thing is I didn’t try to grab the handlebar itself because it’s small, and I don’t have great sensitivity in my hands, so I aimed to hug the vertical bar above. I overjumped the thing, of course, because of the adrenaline, but I held on for dear life and started to swing.” In his head Randy had a countdown; he reckoned he needed to count two seconds to leave the bar at the optimum moment to ring the bell. But, of course, once he jumped everything speeded up and slowed down at the same time. “As I swung,” Randy says, “I counted and jumped and reached for the bell without knowing quite whether I had rung it before hitting the water. It was silent underwater, but as I pushed out I could hear the crowd screaming and yelling and I realized I’d done it. Nothing could wear me down after that. We ran another hour and I was still on an adrenaline high.”
Randy has carried that moment with him in the years since, and no one who has watched the film will forget it either. It proved to him that there are ways to overcome the limitations that life puts in front of you and that there are “a million cool things to do in this world.” He and his wife have a big anniversary this year. They’ve never been to Niagara Falls, but Randy had heard they put a zip line across them. It’s been a hard job getting people who run that wire to approve a blind person going across it, but he thinks he’s winning the argument. “I just say: before you say no, let me show you a few of the things I’ve done lately. After that it’s quite hard for them to argue.”
CHAPTER 4
Authentic at Scale: Growing a Tribal Culture
A small team of A-plus players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players.
—Steve Jobs
The first chocolate feet arrived in the Tough Mudder office in 2012. We had grown fast, from three events in the first year to fourteen the next, and then to thirty-five. There were articles in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. Suddenly everyone wanted to work for us. We needed to hire a hundred new people in 2012, but we were getting five thousand résumés a month. Some people were extremely persistent. A strange trend started in which intern hopefuls would send us giant shoes, some of them muddy from our events, with a note that said: “Now I have my foot in the door . . .” And then somehow that evolved into people sending cast molds of their foot made from chocolate. We got maybe half a dozen chocolate feet.
There were also bags of cookies and homemade cakes, which the guys who worked in the warehouse would share. I felt obliged to point out a few times that this was food from strangers, sent in the mail. And that we had one or two enemies at the time. Mr. Mouse was still on our case, and the rivalry with Spartan was at its height. In the end, we had to ban eating food that came with résumés.
There was a form of flattery in this phenomenon, but it also presented us with another challenge: How coul
d we grow fast and stay true to our values? All start-up businesses stand and fall by virtue of who they hire, but I believed assembling the right core team was more crucial to us than to most. If we were to create and nurture a tribal culture, we would need to find and employ people who took it to heart. If we were serious about our pledge to Mudders, we had to live up to those values in everything we did.
It was straightforward enough to begin with. Our first recruits—alerted by ads on Craigslist—remember being grilled by Guy and me in a closet-size room that doubled as a storage space in the warehouse in DUMBO. The opening questions were generally: Do you have a computer? And do you have access to a car? But after that our queries became more rigorous.
One of the reasons that we were getting so many applications (and chocolate feet) was that we offered a get-out-of-jail card to people who had gone from the self-starting freedom of student life to the 360-degree micromanagement of the corporate world. Jesse Bull, who joined us after the third event, and is still with us, was typical. He was a seriously creative English literature major who had started out trying to make documentaries before finding himself in a job at Barclays investment bank to impress or appease his then girlfriend. After the financial crash, he ended up in the wreckage of Lehman Brothers, desperately looking for an escape route to something he could believe in.
When we interviewed Jesse, we were, happily, able to point to one possible belief system on a poster on the wall—a prototype credo that Guy and I had written, which was an attempt to translate the Mudder pledge recited at the start line of events into a set of principles or a philosophy that we could apply to the business. We made the credo into a poster and stuck one on every wall of the office. Much of it had been adapted from the Toyota mantra of kaizen, or the principle of continuous improvement. Some of it was drawn from my experience at the Foreign Service. Some of it just felt about right. The ten points were these:
Have fun
Push boundaries
Take responsibility
Ask why?
Be honest
Embrace change
Accept only the best
Focus on the long term
Look out for each other
Enjoy the journey
I don’t know what recruits like Jesse made of it in his interview—they were applying to work on mud runs and being presented with the ten commandments—but along with the rest of the people we hired, he was soon left in no doubt that we meant every word.
We knew that if we were to sell our values to the wider Tough Mudder tribe—those ideas of cooperation and continual self-improvement and collective energy—they had to be embodied in our people. Authenticity wasn’t an aspiration for us; it had to be a reality. In an effort to reinforce our instincts at interviews, we took each new employee on for eight weeks as a paid intern before committing to a full-time contract. There were only two jobs in the first year or so: business analyst and event planner. Those eight weeks of induction were designed as a total immersion in the culture, with a series of mentoring sessions and appraisals, plenty of hands-on responsibility at events—all designed to see if there was a fit on both sides. At the end of the eight weeks there was what we called a “cultural interview”—which led to lots of Chairman Mao jokes—designed to test how fully the intern had internalized the culture, and thus understood the values.
If that sounds cultish, I’m unapologetic. When organizations talk about creating an innovative business culture, a lot of people focus on the external symbols. The ping-pong and foosball tables in the office, the team-building Thursday beers after work, the company ski weekends, and the anything-goes dress code. At TMHQ we have all those things. But they are marginal to what we are really about. A culture is built up over months and years of good practice, questioning, and improvement. Of doing things the right way and having anyone who comes into the group or participates in an event recognize what that means. Culture is all the things that happen in an organization when the boss isn’t looking.
Tony Hsieh describes, in his book Delivering Happiness, how he built his online shoe business Zappos by concentrating on service and integrity above all else. “Your personal core values define who you are,” he argued, “and a company’s core values ultimately define the company’s character and brand. For individuals, character is destiny. For organizations, culture is destiny.” I think that’s true, and doubly so when you are “delivering happiness” as an experience that asks people to take on and display some of the virtues of that culture themselves.
In this sense, we believed, in our initial phase of recruiting, that a candidate’s previous career path and qualifications were less important than his or her willingness to embrace our credo. Though we had no experience in event management, the plan was never to go out and hire people from the event industry. We had obstacles where participants jump through flames and we feared the first thing an outside event person might instinctively do was pull out a fire extinguisher.
Sometime early on in our discussions about the Tough Mudder culture—in one of our many debates about who to hire—someone suggested that our criteria could be boiled down to a single phrase, borrowed from the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team: “No Dickheads” (our equivalent of Google’s “Don’t Be Evil”). Later, I had everyone read James Kerr’s book Legacy, about his time spent with the All Blacks, studying their culture: “In Maori, whanau means ‘extended family,’” Kerr observed. “It’s symbolized by the spearhead. To be effective, all its force must move in one direction. Hence the All Blacks select on character as well as talent, which means some of New Zealand’s most promising players never pull on the black jersey—considered dickheads, their inclusion would be detrimental to the whanau.”
There were clear cases of individuals who would never be part of our Tough Mudder whanau. In our first year, we took on an intern who had worked for a year or two on Wall Street. On his first day, I asked him to go look at a potential event venue and report back. Upon his return, he sat at my desk and insisted that before he gave his verdict on the venue we negotiate his terms of employment. He suggested a three-hundred-dollars-a-day retainer in addition to a salary of two hundred thousand dollars—oh, and ten percent of the company. I laughed for a while and terminated his internship on the spot. It didn’t end there, unfortunately. For his road trip, I’d given him my Tough Mudder credit card details and, apparently in revenge, he used those details to sign up for a variety of extreme porn Web sites in my name, including dwarfporn.com, which for a while was a stubbornly returning charge on our credit card statements. He wouldn’t have lasted long with the All Blacks.
Some other hires proved wrong in less blatant ways. We took on a marketing director who had a very impressive background in selling conferences for professionals. Our marketing was quite edgy from the outset. We wanted to contrast our irreverent, muddy approach with events like marathons or triathlons that were much more clean living and earnest. We were never short of photographs to make this point. It quickly became clear, however, that we had somehow employed a marketing director who insisted exclusively on pictures of people in box-fresh T-shirts with a perfectly blue sky behind them and who could see no merit at all in a shot of a bunch of dirty people hauling a friend butt-first over a wall.
It often proved more effective, particularly at the outset, to use people without specialist experience, but with a clear understanding of what we were about, to get a message right. Alex Patterson, hired as a lawyer, was invaluable in this respect. Before joining Tough Mudder he had quit his job as a tax attorney and considered joining the FBI, or working in human rights, or just going surfing. He was, as he describes it now, really “best at entering the fog, not fearing failure, creating something new.”
To try to focus these start-up, fog-entering energies as the company grew and we required different kinds of expertise, I created the internal Tough Mudder University. It was great to have
people who understand our no fear, no whining culture, but as we grew they also needed some specialist insights. Rather than take the risk of hiring people who had those skills but did not understand our context, I tried to use TMU to offer relevant examples of best practices in different areas of the business. I have been critical of some of the small-minded aspects of the culture of competition at Harvard, but there was no doubt that the structure of the way it taught business—using rigorously examined case studies from the real world—was an invaluable tool. At Tough Mudder I personally took on the challenge of teaching case studies in the Harvard manner to fifteen or twenty people at a time each month. This was a big commitment of time on my part when time was in quite short supply, so whatever the employee’s role at Tough Mudder was, I required everyone to carefully read and prepare the cases in advance and to be prepared to discuss the implications for our business just as seriously as they might in a Harvard lecture room. I could be fairly unforgiving of those who did not put time and effort into this preparation. I tried to pick cases relevant to what was happening at the company at the time—looking at Microsoft’s innovation strategy or at Starbucks and the selling of a cultural experience or Innocent smoothies and the art of storytelling.
Most often we returned to kaizen and Toyota. A series of awards evolved, rewarding Tough Mudder initiative and clear thinking and honesty in owning mistakes. We called winners Kaizen Ninjas. Given the technical and logistical challenges of delivering the increased number of events—and the resultant exponential growth in things that could go wrong—Toyota’s 5 Whys principle became integral to our Kaizen Ninja approach. This was the idea that if something went wrong, you asked why five times to get at the real reason for it. So, if a rope broke at a Tough Mudder obstacle, the series of questions and answers would go something like this: Why did the rope break? It was the wrong rope. Why was it the wrong rope? Because we bought the cheap rope. Why did we buy the cheap rope? Because the budget was too low. Why was the budget too low? Because we don’t know how to budget properly. Why don’t we know how to budget? Because we don’t have that capability in obstacle design. Then you’d buy new ropes but also hire someone with the capability that was lacking or develop it in the current staff.
