 For the past few years, we've been talking, especially at the forum, actually, about the need to include more people into facing the challenges we must face. And so it's not only about government anymore, it's not only even about a particular firm, but rather we need to work with all our competitors in an industry, and we need to work with government, and we need to work with employees, but also with unions, with stakeholders across society around environmental issues, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. When you talk about these big paradigms, and how these different mountains have all these different meanings and symbolize different things, but also can illuminate or give you insight into our own leadership, how do you see that feed into this trend, this multi-stakeholder, this managing different aspects of leadership at the same time while trying to pursue our own goals? How do you see that feed into this kind of trendy? Being more inclusive and taking into account. Well, for example, in Latin America, you have a number of different cultures. There are, of course, the various pre-Columbian cultures that continue with the Quechua-speaking people, the Aymara people, people in the Selva, and then you have the overlay, of course, the European, Spanish, Portuguese, and then immigrants from many parts of the world, for example, here in Peru. Recent president Alberto Fujimori was the son of Japanese immigrants. So there's really a much broader spectrum of cultures here. And if you look at mountains in each of these cultures, they reveal things that are important in different ways of thinking. So what you need to do is develop a flexibility of leadership that becomes more inclusive and that's adapted to the particular people that you're working with. In addition to which, if you're doing business abroad, of course you have to deal with people in other cultures, but even running a business or a corporation here in Latin America, you're going to have people from different cultures. And so how do you bring them in? And becoming familiar with different leadership styles that are reflected in these different mountains can play a really critical role in enabling you to be more inclusive and more effective in your leadership. In your metaphors with pigs, would you share some of them with us? Because I thought when I was reading and we were talking before, it was quite insightful and I hadn't thought of mountains in that way, but it was very useful to kind of use them as kind of beacons of things we may want to pursue. Well, to begin with, you automatically have a flexibility. One of the things I often say is, let's say you're very high on a mountain like Everest and a storm comes in a blizzard. What kind of leadership do you want? Do you want somebody to build consensus? It's not the time to be doing that. If you do that, you'll die. What you want is somebody to take over with command and control and say, let's get down. On the other hand, when you're at base camp when it's warm and you've got plenty of time, that's the place to build consensus. So immediately you see flexibility of styles. So I start off with the obvious paradigm, Everest, which is the highest being number one, very important in Western culture, and also the idea of setting and attaining motivational goals and the logistics required for that. And I look at two different ways to climb a mountain like Everest. One is what's called the siege style, modeled on the military with a large operation, a lot of logistics. Then there's something called alpine style, where a small group of very good climbers moves very quickly up the mountain. They're pros and cons of each and they correspond to a large scale operation, often command and control of a large company with a mature product, whereas the alpine style is more of the entrepreneurial start-up, or what's called the skunk work, small operation that develops a new product within a larger company, for example, the way the Macintosh computer was developed within Apple. But then I'll ask you a question, which leads to another paradigm. Who would you say is the most famous and influential mountain climber in Western history? You know my answer, but my thought was the guy who climbed Everest first. Yeah, usually people would say Sir Edmund Hillary, who I used to be on the board with. Well, he's unfortunately passed away, a very interesting person. But I would say much more influential, much more famous in Western history is Moses from the Bible. And if you look at the story of his account, whether or not he actually climbed the mountain, what's important is the story. That's what's had the influence historically, and which serves as a model for us. And we often think of mountain climbing as conquering a mountain, but in the case of Sinai, there's no conquest. What happens is Moses is called to go up in the mountain. He climbs to the top. That's where the meeting place of heaven and earth, so to speak. There he receives something of great value, the Ten Commandments and the first five books of the Bible, and he takes them back down for the benefit of the people and in the process transforms the whole people and develops the Jewish religion. So that becomes a paradigm for the role of a leader in instilling a sense of calling, service, vocation, and transforming an organization. And that's not so much directed as the bottom line, which of course is important, but other things that are very important, especially for younger people here in Latin America, which is how do you develop a sense of meaning and values that will help you to transform society as well as make a profit. So that's another example which I've mentioned is Mount Fuji, which of course is a symbol of corporate culture and how you develop identity and teamwork. And then a paradigm I have that applies right here to Peru is Machu Picchu. So Machu Picchu is an iconic mountain, of course, for Peru and for Latin America, so in a sense functions a little like Fuji. But also if you look at it as an archaeological site, it becomes a paradigm for building accomplishments of enduring value, that are not just short term things. So the ruins have gone for a long time afterwards. And the business application of that that I got from my friends who came with us at the Himalayas last year is that Intelligo, which is a company here that does financial services, in 2008 when the market crashed, a number of their clients had invested in a fund connected with Bernard Madoff, who did the Ponzi scheme, the Great Pyramid scheme, where people lost billions of dollars, and the clients were upset, they lost all their money. So they mentioned this to Intelligo, and Intelligo had no responsibility for it because the clients had bought this money, these investments on their own, but under the leadership of Carlos Rodriguez Pastor and Reynaldo Roizenwied, who is here, both of whom were here, they came to the conclusion that what they should do is reimburse the clients for the full value, not 50%, but the full value of their losses for the longer enduring value of establishing good long term client relationships. One of their competitors heard about this, and they only reimbursed 50%, and they got a lot of bad will as a result of that. So those are examples of some of the paradigms. And one of the things you mentioned, as mountains, as icons of culture, for instance, like Mount Fuji or Machu Picchu here in Peru and Latin America. I always say that Latin America is still a very disconnected region of the world, and we were talking about that before, and these events, actually the forum events, are particularly good places to talk about it, and of course to try to fix it, because we can connect to the world, and with the world. And I have this perception that actually we're disconnected, that we don't trade as much, we don't get as much aid, or investment, and that in some ways we're also culturally isolated. Much more homogeneous at home, you know, in a world that is multicultural in so many ways. We're very, you know, Christian, even, you know, majority, mostly Catholic, but you know, different types of Christianity. So it's, to me, we're a bit too homogeneous, and so on, so that we're maybe less tolerant. What's your take on that? On letting America connect to the world, and in a way letting America connect to itself? Well, superficially you might say Latin America seems homogeneous from the outside, but if you start to get into it, and I'm sure most of you are here aware, there's a lot of diversity here. To begin with, yes, on the surface it's Christian, but then, particularly in a country like Peru, you have the pre-Columbian religions which are still surviving. So for example, there's a very important festival in Buriti near Cusco that happens in June, which combines the worship of Jesus with the worship of the Appus or mountain deities, and some of the people go up and make offerings on the glacier to both Jesus and the Appu. And in terms of Catholicism, many of the pre-Columbian deities have been assimilated into Catholicism as saints, or for example, Pachamama, the Earth Goddess, becomes the Virgin Mary, and there are a lot of examples of this. I have a colleague who's done a lot of research. We did some research ourselves in Greece on sacred mountains, but he does high altitude archaeology. He discovered Juanita, the Inca ice maiden, which is now, I believe, in the museum in Cusco, at about 21,000, over 6,000 meters. And in the case of the Andean communities, mountains are still invoked as worshipped as sources of rain and water, which is essential for life. This is a very common theme. I work a lot in the Himalayas. The whole Himalayan range, for example, in Nepal is revered, among other things, the source of water. The word means literally the abode of snow from which the water comes. So in Latin America, you have a lot of indigenous cultures that still survive, and especially in the Selva side in the jungle in the Amazon region. So there's an incredible diversity among them. They're not all the same. And then even in Christianity, in religions, you have Catholicism. But now, of course, you've got evangelical Protestantism, which is making great inroads. So there's quite a deal of diversity, religiously speaking, and culturally. And then, as I mentioned before, you have a lot of immigrants who've come here. Of course, the earliest immigrants were the Spanish and the Portuguese. But now you have people from Japan, Europe, all over the world have come here. In addition to which, I think Latin America, for one of the reasons that the Peruvian economy is booming, is because of trade with Asian countries like China. So there's no longer an isolation. And in order to do this kind of trade and to recognize other leadership styles, you need to become aware of what it is that motivates people in these other cultures. So one of the themes of this conference is basically change that's coming not only economically but socially. And I think what's really important for this is you're going to need leadership, which is flexible, able to look at different points of view and also tries to cover as much as possible the full range of possibilities. So that's why using different peak paradigms, the metaphor then is a whole range of peaks, there's a whole range of values and approaches and ways of thinking about leadership that will be very important for the future of Latin American development, both socially, environmentally, and economically. And so how do you see us connecting to the world? You, you've traveled around the world, climbing mountains, among other things. And what do you think we can learn from the East? The other, of course, the icon is Everest and you mentioned the Himalayan culture. Well, let me give you an example from what we do on our leadership treks in the Himalayas. We started off doing it for graduates, mid-career graduates of the Wharton Executive MBA program. Now these are very Type A people that are very competitive, very driven. We take them out in the Himalayas on a trip like this and you could do the same thing here in Peru and the amazing thing happens, they all become very cooperative and they start to bond and develop ways of interacting with each other that they really relate to but they need to know but they haven't really practiced back home. So that's one thing. For example, there's a style of Asian leadership which is reflected in Taoism which is, from their point of view, a leader leads best when people hardly know he or she is leading and people say we did it themselves. So often we think here, well, you know, the leader has to be the caldillo, the big leader who gets all the attention. Well, often you motivate people much more if they get personal responsibility and get credit for what they're doing and then there's a lot more buy-in. That's an Asian idea which is very useful to be used in many different cultures. So there are a number of examples like this. So should we start climbing mountains? Oh, no. With our teams? Well, first of all, when we go to Himalayas, well, we walk up a peak. We don't do anything technical and I should confess that when I was young I did a lot of climbing and I got into dangerous situations although I'm a very cautious person but I haven't climbed in years. What I found was when I went to Nepal living there, I got more interested in walking through the mountains and being there. And to me the fullest metaphor and I'll give a number of presentations on peak paradigms for business groups and I'll deal with the different mountains but the final one or near the final one is what I call the mountain journey because if you look at the full course of an organization or a person's life it's not just going up a mountain or even around a mountain which is a practice that's done. It's basically a series of ups and downs. It's really a horizontal journey with ups and downs on the way. So you attain a goal and then you come down the other side into a valley and you go up over another ridge and this is basically the progress of an organization. And one of the insights you get from mountain climbing is that the most dangerous part of a climb is the descent. That's where you've lost focus, motivation. The same sort of thing happens in business. You know, you work very hard to attain a goal, you get it, everybody says, we've gotten it, now they sort of get tired. They start to make mistakes and the critical thing for a leader is a leader is going to have to lead through those valleys to get to the next mountain. How does he or she do that? That's really the real critical test of leadership. Not when things are going really well and you're all excited. And we were talking about multiple bottom lines, triple bottom lines, double bottom lines. And we were also talking about how in the past you had maybe kind of ensured some commitment from your team whereas today more and more we have to strive beyond professionals to our companies and to our organizations. We need to keep them motivated. So this analogy seems particularly fitting to these times. Like when you have to not only get to the goal like one time but rather keep coming to it but also building something in the process. Right, and the process, if you focus just on the goal, you don't realize you've got a great opportunity of building a team and an enduring organization for the long term. So even if there's a failure, that makes them stronger. So you need to look at that as well. And we were talking about triple bottom line and one of the greatest insights for me in our preparation for this session was benefit-personal multiple bottom line. And in your experience, that was triggered by the avalanche experience. And a few of us have faced actual death actually at a point that when I was reading you, you were describing how you were dying or so you thought. And so why don't you tell us a little bit about that particular anecdote and how it changed the way you see your own goals. Okay, well actually in a strange way, it began in Buenos Aires. My sister checked a book out of the library called Ana Porna, which she thought was an adventure story about a girl named Ana Porna like Nancy Drew Mystery's stories in the United States. It was actually an account of the first ascent of one of the world's highest mountains, Ana Porna. And she tossed it on her bed and I found it and became entranced by it. So eventually in Nepal, we went on an expedition to Annapurna South, one of these peaks. It's higher than Aquncagua, higher than anything outside of Asia. And what happened was there were four of us and we were following somebody who was leading who was much more experienced than us. And he led us directly up an avalanche runoff slope and they come over cliffs and the glaciers advance and when they let go they cause the largest avalanches you have. When this happens in the ocean you get icebergs and in the mountains you get enormous avalanches. So I was very uncomfortable with this. I knew it was very dangerous and I looked up and one of these glaciers shattered, hung there for a moment, and then it fell away and all of a sudden this massive cloud blew up with chunks of ice on it, roaring down on us. It was the most powerful thing I'd ever experienced. It sounded like a thousand thunderstorms. We tried to run but there was no place to hide and it stopped and it was a beautiful day all around me. As far as I knew you didn't survive an avalanche like this with the ice and it just hit me with absolute certainty you're going to die. And I just stopped and I looked around and it looked as though the mountains were around me as if they were on the screen of a movie theater that I was about to step out of. And then I gave up. I was totally freaked out. Something deep within me rose up and took over and then I found myself doing everything very smoothly, very precisely as if I knew exactly what I was doing but I was like, what am I doing? And I watched myself. The avalanche hit. It was a tremendous blow and then I was flying maybe a hundred kilometers an hour, it's very hard to tell and I was swimming in this wave of snow and ice and air. Things were hitting me and I couldn't understand why I was swimming because I was convinced I was going to get crushed to death this went on for a long time I can't tell you how long but I went maybe 300 meters down this gentle slope and then the avalanche came to a stop it had picked up powder snow which you know was fluffy what I discovered was when an avalanche stops with powder snow it sets like concrete and I had lost my mittens my hands were bare I couldn't even wiggle my fingers the snow was so hard and to me that was the most horrible way to go and I was very panicky and then for some reason all of a sudden an extraordinary calm came over me and I saw there was nothing to be afraid of death was literally not anything at all there was nothing there to be afraid of it was a matter of becoming part of the world around me and I started to go into it and as I did all of a sudden one of my hands completely on its own, no direction from me went bang and I had an airspace and could breathe then I started thinking you know there are three of us, the others must be dead nobody is going to come looking for us I can't wait for somebody to dig me out because nobody is going to dig me out I either get out or I die and I started wiggling around and I couldn't make any headway I jumped to the conclusion I was pinned under a block of ice and I remembered in the avalanche reading an account of a French climber who chiseled his way out with a pocket knife and a piton, a climbing spike in the Alps but I was up at twice the altitude there were a bunch of different ways of dying that presented themselves and so I got panicky again I was in a diving position so just my boots were sticking out but people have suffocated to death being buried much less deeply than that at lower altitudes and the calm came again that all of a sudden my body went bang and I popped out sort of like a cork out of a bottle and then I was standing up and I went over and he couldn't get out he said dig and I said I can't my hands are frozen and so I was kicking at his legs and I wasn't kicking very hard afraid of gashing him with my crampons spikes on my boots there was a big boom and another glacier broke off and another avalanche came toward us and I tried to run not that I would have gotten very far but the rope had gotten tangled around my legs so I couldn't take a step I was just so exhausted and the avalanche stopped right next to us and covered us with dust so then I kicked like hell and we got him out and we came down so there were some lessons that I developed that were very important for leadership that I also use in my talks the first one which is not as important is we often assume that somebody who is experienced has good judgment that's not always the case the person who led us into the avalanche was very experienced he made the first winter ascent of Mount McKinley but he went straight up where he shouldn't have gone so you got to look at experience and judgment when you're looking at leadership the second one took a number of years to develop and it really has that triple thing that you're talking about which is in the middle of the night after the avalanche I woke up and for the first time on the entire expedition I felt like climbing the mountain just for the sheer joy of climbing it up till then I had been trying to climb the mountain to entertain an objective to make up for things that had gone wrong and it had been a very grim sort of experience well we couldn't I lost everything and we had to go down but over the years what I've learned is and it took me quite a while to learn this was that when I do things for the joy of doing them that's when I do them best that's when also I feel most fulfilled in doing them and when I have the best effect on others so the conclusion I've drawn from leadership is a very effective way of leading is if a leader can take joy in what he or she is doing and communicate that to the people that they're leading so that they enable the people who are following them or in their organization to fulfill themselves at the same time as they fulfill their goals and I found a great example of this in business in the United States Clifton Wharton, not the Wharton School but Clifton Wharton, took over TIA CRAF which is a huge pension fund in the United States which was a structure which was a mammoth job and what he said about the job which was very difficult was I was having a ball the wonderful time sometimes hard to imagine how would you advise us to get to that short of an hour lunch because I personally won't try to get up there I thought the first lesson was going to be don't do that but short of that how would I do something like that today's responsibilities our own goals maybe they're not as multiple bottom lines as they should be so what would be a way you would advise us to find our multiple goals and our multiple dimensions well first of all you might ask the question that's asked why climb mountains most famous answer for that is because it's there George Mallory gave before he disappeared on Everest well you have to ask a second question what is there for you and so in addition to attaining a goal with the bottom line what is it that you're doing what is it that really excites you and that you're passionate about and what you're doing and really think about that because after the avalanche at first I thought it was a total failure and then I started thinking well at that period why am I climbing mountains why am I doing what I'm doing and this is the question you need to ask with whatever you're doing and I was I asked myself why am I doing it and I realized I was about 23 and I was interested in getting experiences for writing and also developing a sense of identity being at that age and I was looking I realized for unusual experiences and then I thought to myself well you know surviving an avalanche like that was much more unusual than getting to the summit of even an unclimbed peak and then that enabled me to look at the experience in a more positive way rather than just writing it off as a failure not that I'd go out looking for it and that's the last thing I do but if something like that has happened what can you learn from it that inspires you so basically looking at your work what it is that you know you're really excited about focusing on that another way of doing it in the various ways and this is something that someone on one of our tracks learned is often we focus all our attention on the goal and we become overly committed to worrying about whether or not we're going to succeed but it really gets in the way of taking enjoy of what you're doing and a helpful thing to do there is yes keep the goal in mind but don't worry so much about whether you succeed or fail and focus more on what you're doing in the moment putting it in a larger context and that often and finding what's exciting and interesting and what you're doing now that you can communicate to others so there are a variety of ways to do this well it's amazing how time flies and we're having fun and so we're literally running out of time but it's an interesting we're told so many times of things like that but it's not until we hit a wall sometimes that we actually go back in our own cases and our own lives and re-examine it and ask those questions so I guess we should be looking not for trouble necessarily but for ways to face ourselves and those around us actually that's perhaps even the hardest part because it's not only about our own motivation but also those around us what moves them and how do we make sure that what we're doing together fulfills them as well it's been again time flew but it's been very interesting to discuss this preparation now and I hope for sure our conversation will continue and also perhaps somebody else with the audience thanks a lot for your insight and your time and how kind did you were and thanks a lot for everyone for coming to this session well thank you, you've done a big decent job with the discussion