Getting to the Top of the Mountain...in Business

By Lisa Lupo

Standing on top of the mountain isn’t what is important, it’s all about the journey and the lessons learned along the way. The journey and lessons learned by PestWorld’s Thursday morning Keynote speaker world-renowned adventurer and author Alison Levine in her ventures ranging from Mt. Everest to the South Pole, taught her lessons that can be applied business.

In the Thursday morning Opening session, sponsored by Syngenta, Levine discussed the Everest Expedition of which she was the captain of the first women’s team, and shared lessons learned and their relationship to business. Among those lessons were:

• It’s not just about technique, it’s about willpower.
• Choose your team based on ego ... “You want ego.” That is, performance ego, through which a person is good at what he or she does – and knows it; and team ego, in which each member is proud to a be part of a team and sees the team accomplishment as more important than what can be done by him- or herself.
• Even when you spend time going backward, you’re still making progress. Reaching the top of Everest is not a straight-forward climb. To acclimatize your body, you have to more upward then backward a number of times to slowly let your body get used to the altitude. “Backing up is not the same thing as backing down,” she said.
• Put time into networking and building relationships. While having people who have your back may not be the life and death situation of climbing, you never know when those relationships will help you in business as well.
• The leader has to be a part of the team. Never expect anyone on the team to endure anything you aren’t willing to yourself.
• Fear is okay ... complacency is what will kill you. Set small goals; and when in situations where there is constant change, you have to be able to act and react quickly. Don’t get yourself stuck in a pre-existing plan and unable to make needed changes.

And those constantly changing situations and storms that crop up ... remember one thing about storms, “They’re always temporary.”

Levine discusses the expedition journey and lessons learned in her book, “On the Edge.”