Conquering the North Face

by Hap Klopp

Ian told me another story that day. On one of his early voyages across the Atlantic—sailing from the Caribbean to England—he encountered a horrendous storm, with 40- to 50-foot waves. When he was down below, he felt the boat slide down one of those huge waves. Suddenly he heard a loud bang—it sounded to him as if the bottom had been torn from the boat. He was shaken. He had an urgent pull in his stomach, and he raced to lift up the floorboards for a look. It was frightening—what would he find?

  What he found, incredibly, was that everything was fine. The noise he had heard was simply the engine jump starting—it was caused by the propeller being spun as the boat rode down the wave.

  Relieved, he went up on deck to tell his wife what had happened. She had been at the wheel. But when Ian went on deck, his wife was nowhere to be found. He went into a panic—at least at first. This was the one person who shared his dream. She did not just share the dream; she was an integral part of it. Without her, there was no dream. She was everything. And she apparently had been thrown from the boat.

  It was pouring. The night was pitch black. The wind was howling, the waves were monstrous. Ian called out her name. He screamed it. But the night was so loud and ominous it was to no avail. He had that same urgent pull in his stomach—only tenfold. She was lost somewhere in the Atlantic.

  Quickly logic came to the fore. Ian executed a perfect figure-eight rescue move that sailors are taught. Then he proceeded directly back on the line he believed they had taken. Thirty minutes later, miraculously, he spotted her and pulled her aboard. She was safe! Admittedly, she had some broken ribs and a minor case of hypothermia. But their dream was safe.

  It was ten years later when he told me that story— laughing the whole way through it. “The point is,” he said, “she still sails with me.” His was a religious belief in his dream—one that said risking everything is worth the chance to get everything. And it was backed up by a purely logical approach to his craft—sailing. He found out how tough it could be, and he passed the test.

  It all comes from the spark. I had a plumber come by to fix a water leak in my house. What he did really didn’t interest me, but it sure interested him. His vision may have appeared small to me. But tracking his way through a maze of pipes was to him a fantastic way to make money. His wasn’t a giant spark across the sky like the Kocklemans’, but it was just as legitimate a spark. His took the form of a short conquest—a water heater and a set of pipes. When I looked at the plumbing, I hadn’t a clue. He was the man of the moment.

  These are not just stories about people who were determined to be successful, and so they were. There is a point. The reason people are successful is because they work to get the spark. They are not afraid to follow it, and they are not afraid of asking others to follow. It does not just magically occur in some and lie dormant in others. It is, once again, a combination of logic and inspiration—conveyed to others with infectious optimism. Either one without the other is bound to fall short of a true goal. Logic and hard work without inspiration will lead only to a tedious existence. On the other hand, there is nothing more wasteful than a lazy dreamer.

  Tom and Priscilla Wrubel could easily have been lazy dreamers, and no one would have even noticed. No one, that is, except themselves. Tom was an architect who owned a plant store. He had a degree in architecture, but he wasn’t satisfied with it. The plant store was sort of a steppingstone for him and Priscilla—not really what they wanted, but closer to it than architecture. They wanted to make money showing his appreciation of nature. And they wanted to educate others to appreciate it also.

  The problem with the plant store was it didn’t really help preserve nature, and it wasn’t unique. It was basically a cookie-cutter occupation. So they kept thinking. What was it? What could it be that they were looking for? Slowly the idea began to take shape: a store that sold gifts that celebrated nature, optics for stargazing and bird watching, blow-up dinosaurs, gift cards with natural settings and materials, and fossil reproductions. They wanted to create awareness. They wanted a nice place to work that they could be proud to call their own. They didn’t want to evangelize about preserving nature; they wanted people to enjoy themselves as they became aware. Their overall goal was commitment.

  The Nature Company is now a chain of retail stores doing in excess of $100 million a year in sales. The stores are great—a celebration of nature, and of the Wrubels’ vision. Water trickles and falls throughout the stores. The walls are a light wood. Nature tapes of wind, and rain, and animals play through speakers. It is a deep-forest ambience. There is even dappled light, just as you would experience walking among tall trees on a sunny day.

  It would have been easy for Tom to use his architecture degree and maintain a nice, secure life. Or he and Priscilla could have pretended to be satisfied by his plant shop. But they found their spark and lived by it.

  It is a wonderful thing to see the physical truth of a dream that once existed only in someone’s mind. It is a powerful, fluid event as the thought process works, as something great evolves and becomes reality.

  I was once told the story of a window dresser for Macy’s in New York City. The man was very good at his craft. He had earned a reputation for doing the most visible, the most daring, the most eye-catching displays in the entire city. But Macy’s continued to challenge him. It was leadership at its best—a great talent challenged to go the extra step, from interesting to brilliant.

  This man was to do a display of Macy’s new kitchen set—a table, chairs, china, stemware, everything. So he did. He set a beautiful table; the whole nine yards. I believe it even had a realistic-looking turkey on a tray. His boss came to look at it. “That’s great,” he said. “I like it. Really interesting. But you know, I’d like something more. Something different. It has the promise of greatness. Why don’t you do it again?”

  The window dresser was dumbfounded. It seemed great, he thought. What more could he do? But he kept thinking. What more indeed? He went outside and looked in at the window, analyzing the perspective of the shopper. Thinking it out, staring. Mentally he began putting different pieces in different places. Suddenly, exactly like a spark, it hit him. What if, he thought, the entire display were glued and wired together so it could be turned on its side—suspended in air? What if the shopper walking down the street could look in the window at the wall and actually be looking down on the entire display, as if from an overhead camera?

  And so it was. The table and chairs were hung on their sides. The china, napkins, etc., were glued to the table. And the display was incredible.

  That’s how it is where logic meets religion—hard work becomes the stuff of genius. You don’t have to be a genius to be a genius. You just have to want it badly enough, and you can’t be deterred by criticism. You have to be an 800-pound gorilla in a 100-pound world.

  One such person was Howard Head. An aircraft engineer during World War II, Head became fascinated with skiing in 1947. It was a fun sport, but Head wanted more. He was frustrated by the immobility of the heavy wooden skis, and he was certain he could make better skis.

  Aluminum! That was the answer. The spark came in an instant. The skis took a while to design. Quite a while. He had a number of problems with the prototypes. But he kept thinking about aluminum skis—skiing on aluminum skis—having all his colleagues at such places as Tuckerman’s Ravine test his prototype aluminum skis. The spark was ever constant.

  When he finally perfected aluminum skis, Head Ski flourished. Another one of those “overnight” successes—it took years. At one point Head captured more than 70 percent of the market. But sparks sometimes fade or are replaced by other sparks, and in Head’s case it was the latter—the even newer spark of fiberglass skis.

  Head Ski faltered, and the investors panicked. Head was edged out and replaced by a committee, a professional management team conspiculously devoid of industry knowledge. A familiar story. The management team purged the company of the knowledgeable people Howard Head had assembled to carry out his visi
on. Head Ski, under its new management, lost more market share. Five years later none of the new management team was around. They were off helping other companies with the experience they had gained at the expense of Head. Head was sold to AMF.

  What of Howard Head, who had been branded nothing more than an entrepreneur despite meteoric success? At the age of 60 he took up tennis and never looked back. A new spark hit him, and a new adventure commenced. He became determined to build a better tennis racket and took over Prince. He was frustrated by the shots he “just missed,” so he designed the world’s first oversize tennis racket. Once again he revolutionized an industry. He became a leader again and proved his leadership skills, which finally culminated in a highly profitable sale of the company to Cheeseborough-Ponds.

  Sparks are not just for the young, but they are born of the energy of youth. They are the fluid essence of adventure, and if you follow them in their truest state, they will lead you not just to success, but to understanding.

  4

  TESTING THE SPARK:

  Eye to Eye with Those You Love

  Helen Thayer imagined the crunch. It would sound like a chomp on a frozen chocolate bar with nuts, maybe. Or perhaps there would be more of a hollow crackle, like large crickets squished underfoot—in an empty gymnasium. Cccc-rrrrr-uuuuuuunch!

  The bear had lain in wait behind a 30-foot mound of ice in the Arctic Circle. Thayer was on a sled behind a dog named Charlie. Suddenly the bear lurched from behind the mound. It was huge—bigger than a skyscraper, with wide, furry limbs and massive, angry teeth. It roared. Thayer backed away slowly. It slapped her sled. She was in awe. It just tossed the sled over with a wave of its paw.

  “In that moment [when she first saw the bear] I realized that all I knew meant nothing,” she told Ms. magazine. “I learned that in the face of that magnificent, killing creature, my gun might as well have been a toothpick and that I was no more important than the tiniest speck of snow. I knew if he got my head in his mouth, there’d be a very loud crunch.”

  She was on the last legs of her journey when she ran into the bear. She was returning from becoming the first woman to ever go solo to the magnetic North Pole. This bear was not the first she had run into on the trip. But it was the meanest.

  She had no choice but to unleash Charlie. Charlie was a gift, a bullish, black husky-Newfoundland mix given to her just before she took off on the trip. He was a brave, loyal friend—a cunning, tundra-wise scout raised on Cornwallis Island in Canada’s Northwest Territories by an Inuit polar bear hunter. A dog raised by a polar bear hunter; Charlie turned out to be a most wonderful gift.

  It was when Thayer was thinking about the crunch that Charlie made his move. Charlie used his speed to get at the legs of the bear. Charlie bit and danced. The bear became confused. Charlie held on. The bear spun around, reaching to slap Charlie as it had the sled. But Charlie was quicker, holding on and spinning faster. Around and around they went. Thayer stared as it all moved in front of her in the slow motion of urgency. Each heartbeat seemed to take hours, yet it went so fast.

  Finally the bear freed himself, and Charlie took off running. The bear, who moments earlier had been staring at Thayer as if she were dinner at the Ritz, took off after Charlie.

  She blinked.

  They were gone. Charlie and the bear. Barking and growling and racing over the tundra, just like two wild animals in the wilderness.

  The barking and growling disappeared. Thayer waited. A minute, two. Five minutes, ten—nothing. She stood, breathing. Thinking. She was forcing her will on events out of sight, beyond control. Charlie will be back. Charlie will be back, she told herself.

  A half hour later Charlie finally reappeared. He was panting. His coat was sweaty, even in the Arctic cold. But he was happy—his tail wagged. Thayer knew the bear was gone, and the two of them, woman and dog, breathed in the air like champagne.

  They had transcended the barrier that divides humans from animals. They had connected. Each had bought into the vision of a joint quest to the magnetic North Pole. Officially the 27-day journey over 345 miles of bleak landscape was the first-ever solo effort by a woman. But Thayer knows better. Solo? Hell no; she did it with Charlie.

  Friendship is not something to be taken lightly in the world of adventuring. Likewise, connections should not be taken lightly in the world of business, or in any world. The friendship of a human and a dog can accomplish great things. Imagine the potential of a human-to-human connection.

  When I was 18, I had a 3.9 grade-point average and an opportunity to play football on scholarship for the local Spokane community college. I had also been accepted at Stanford—no scholarship. At the community college I would be a star quarterback. I knew that. At Stanford, I could try out for the team. I was five foot eight. I was fast, and I had a pretty good arm. But I was five foot eight.

  What to do? Well, accepting a scholarship was out of the question in my proud and well-to-do family. But still, I could be a star. From day one I wanted to be a pro athlete. I wanted to be really good at something. I didn’t like mediocrity. And the easiest, clearest picture of excelling is in athletics.

  One night, when I was out having some beers with a friend of mine in the mountains around Spokane, she looked right at me and told me the nicest thing anyone had ever said up to that point. “You stupid shit,” she said. “You have an opportunity to go to Stanford, one of the best schools in the country, and you’re thinking of throwing it away so you can be a star for two more years.” She was one of my best friends. Not a girlfriend. A friend.

  “You’re out of your mind,” she said. “You’re never going to play football professionally, and to pass up that opportunity is crazy.”

  Generally I listen to my friends when I feel a true connection. Advice without a friendship is not a connection. It has an ulterior motive.

  When my friends talk, it may take a while to reach me, because always I trust my instinct first. But I’ve tried my best to avoid a personal Vietnam where I made a decision and followed it so blindly that I trusted no one. When somebody you love is telling you something from his or her own heart and not trying to sell you a bill of goods, you hear it. You may not agree, but it definitely comes into play.

  When I sold The North Face, the advice of friends was quite helpful. Selling was a tremendously difficult decision. I had spent 20 years building it, and I felt there were hundreds of things left to accomplish. It was like one of my children. But finances were thin, and I needed to raise quite a bit of money to finance the growth I planned. In addition, one of my ex-employees, whom I had fired, was a shareholder. This man had a personal vendetta against me. He fabricated things about me and the company when talking to other shareholders. He wanted to get the company sold—probably more for his ego than economics. He even suggested to some that once I was gone, he would be a perfect replacement. On that point no one took him seriously—his subpar record from working in the company was well known.

  But it was tumultuous. A dissident minority spearheaded by this self-serving ex-employee wanted out of the company. It was them or me. Either I bought them out and financed the growth, or they would sell their shares to someone undesirable. We held board meetings constantly—full of intrigue and uncertainty. But I had a narrow majority on my side, and I arranged financing for the buy out and for our planned growth from a variety of sources (banks, foreign partners, personal funds, etc.). Finally I was in a position to execute the buy out. But the whole situation bothered me. I was borrowing all the money. I had to guarantee everything. If, somehow, things didn’t work out, I would be personally bankrupt and a lot of my friends would lose their jobs.

  The risk didn’t bother me—at least no more than usual. Risk, after all, is risk. Interest rates could go up, the economy could go bad. The risk was there. The challenge didn’t bother me—I was ready to take it on, and I was ready to take on the ex-employee with the personal vendetta. But something was wrong. I knew it, but I wouldn’t admit it. I couldn’t
put it into words. Something, just something.

  At this point I talked to four of my directors, all personal friends. Each approached me at different times. They said it differently, but each had a common theme: “You don’t look like you’re having fun anymore,” they said. “Why bother with the additional debt and with restructuring the company? Why not get out and move on to something you can enjoy?”

  There it was. I had always told myself I would get out when it was no longer fun. My friends were right. The connection clarified everything. The fun was gone. Too many negatives had gone into the buy out, too many new worries had been added. I thought long and hard. In many ways it hurt to sell the company. But I took a deep breath, and I did it. I never looked back. I went skiing with my family.

  Listening, rather than blindly going about your own course, is extremely important. If you are an evolving individual, you must be adaptable. You have to have an ego check to understand whether a goal is more ego driven than reality driven. Ego, after all, can be blinding. From perspective comes knowledge, and no one has a corner on knowledge.

  It is important to know the perspective of the person offering advice. For instance, someone who went through the Depression has a completely different mind-set from those generations born since the 1930s. But just as important as their life perspective is their perspective to you. The people to trust are those you love and those who love you. Some would say it is best to trust only those who have nothing to gain by giving you advice—the people who think more about you than their image or their job. But often it is also important to test your ideas with those they affect most—those whose lives are riding on your decisions. In business it is important to test ideas with friends completely outside the company as well as employees and family. If you can make a connection with those giving the advice, the input is invaluable.

  Ralph Keeney is one of the world’s foremost authorities on decision analysis, yet when faced with a major decision affecting his own life, he found it very important to test the spark—to assign values to the wants, needs, and aspirations in his life. Keeney has taught at Harvard, Stanford, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has worked all over the world. He also does regular consulting for government and business on critical decision making. His is a rational, reasoned approach.