Conquering the North Face Read online

  This weighted system is installed with fear and with rewards—it examines everything but talent and drive. Who was your cousin? Did you go to Stanford? Do you have an MBA, and do you speak Flemish? Will you do everything we say without question?

  Susan Butcher knows all about this. Butcher is a native of Cambridge, Massachusetts—hometown of Harvard and the Eastern intellectual elite. A nice place, but not exactly the great outdoors for an adventurer.

  Somehow Butcher found her way to Alaska and became interested in dog sledding. The interest gave way to obsession—it would define her. The sport became her life.

  No sport in the world had been more of a man’s domain than dog sledding. A man and his dogs. Alone. A gun by his side and a passion to his stare. The gun was to fend off polar bears, wolves, moose, and other dangerous animals. The stare was also a tool—a necessary gait in the attitude.

  The pinnacle of dog sledding is the Iditarod Trail race, 1,150 miles of equally intense weather and scenery. It runs from Anchorage to Nome. The land is spectacular in its desolation. Shades of white on white, pale skies, and a gigantic silence. The challenges of the Iditarod change from year to year. The only constant is loneliness.

  Usually, the weather is cold and crisp—the type that can freeze shut the eyes of a racer. Ice constantly forms in beards and eyebrows. Sometimes, however, the weather is warm and the snow is soft; then sleds and dogs break through the crust, making it impossible to ride. Racers often must run alongside the sled. Sometimes they have to pick up the sled and carry it over obstacles. A rider’s dogs can be attacked by wild animals, or they can die of exhaustion. One year the race was held up by the migration of thousands of moose. Another year the fog became so dense that many mushers got lost.

  Into this world of men, in the late 1970s, walked Susan Butcher. She wasn’t even Alaskan.

  People scoffed. She had entered the land of Can’t. “You can’t,” she was told. “It’s dangerous … You’re a woman … We’re only thinking about your safety.”

  The men were thinking about their egos. They may have had some genuine concern about her safety; that is felt for every racer. But their major concern was about jeopardizing the purity of their private club. This is for men, honey. Go home and sew something.

  They had their little laughs while they toasted one another in their local bars. But Susan Butcher went on to win the Iditarod four times, the most times for anyone in the history of the race. In 1990 she was voted athlete of the year by Sports Illustrated.

  Susan Butcher proved everyone wrong by sledding right around the embalming fluid of sexism. She entered the most intense dog race in the world—a race that almost bubbles over with opportunities for can’t—and she won. And then she did it again. And again. And again.

  Last year, Rick Swenson won his fifth, just beating out Susan. But she is still driven and intends to keep competing—and winning. They are still saying can’t—No one, not a woman or even a man, can win the Iditarod six times. That’s what they say.

  But from the beginning we at The North Face recognized her talent. I am proud to say that we were the first company to sponsor her. We recognized and supported her quest and leadership long before it was topical, and long before she ever won an Iditarod race. Some of it was luck (she knocked on our door), and some of it was insight. When we sponsored someone, it was never just for business purposes. We took a special interest in people and their passions because we were genuinely interested.

  The monoliths will always have you believe that you are in God’s Little Waiting Room. You don’t live; you wait under their control. Quiet resignation is their goal for you.

  They do it in so many ways. Little ways that grow big. Big ways that can’t be ignored.

  Doors. They do it with doors—barriers that suggest you are not to come in; you are not good enough. They close the door to their office, and they put a gaudy brass nameplate on it that clearly says, “This person is really important.”

  They do it with labels—when they label things “executive,” such as the executive washroom, or the executive dining room, or the executive parking space. What feudal crap! It’s medieval, this tier system of privilege. It says you are nothing if you don’t have access to these perquisites. If you listen to this, you might even start believing it. A company that loses touch with its employees loses everything.

  As for an executive parking space, all I can say is, get to work early if you want a good parking space. It’s that simple.

  Electronic computer access is another barrier. You can’t have information. There it is, can’t again. Knowledge is power, and they don’t want to give it away. This time you are not trusted. They dream up a secret password and then refuse to give it to you—limiting the access you have to vital information about the company. Often it is precisely the information you need for timely, accurate decision making. But so vital is this information, apparently, it is more vital than you.

  That’s how it always is, isn’t it? The employee is the least-valuable part of the company. Just a cog in the wheel, right? Stick ’em in the embalming fluid of the workaday world and watch the body die.

  Richard Bangs used to meet up with those people all the time. It was Ethiopia, 1973. The Omo river. It had never been run on a raft before.

  Bangs set running the Omo as a personal goal, a life quest at age 22. So, like anyone serious who wants to accomplish anything, he began studying and asking questions about the nature of his goal. He went to zoos, museums, libraries, anywhere he could find out about the Omo River.

  Everybody told him he was insane—too young and too inexperienced to even try. They told him about crocodiles and hippos, and poisonous snakes, and unpredictable diseases.

  He had nightmares. His imagination ran wild. But he had been a river guide for the five years he attended Northwestern University. He had been a river guide on the mighty Colorado River, taking powerful clients such as the president of MGM, corporate lawyers, and even movie stars on the rides of their lives.

  Of that time period Bangs told me, “It was incredible. I was in awe of them. If I went to their offices, I couldn’t get inside the door. But on that raft, they relied on me.” Those four sentences describe perfectly what I am trying to say: If leaders respect the skill and opinions of others, they have a lot to gain. And if they don’t respect them, they are in grave danger.

  Bangs thought he was in grave danger when he listened to the experts. He had never even undertaken an adventure outside the United States before. They were right, the trip did sound insane. But he never thought of cancelling it. He just dwelt on how to solve what might go wrong. Finally he hopped on a plane and flew to Ethiopia. He imagined the worst. And he prepared for it.

  As soon as he arrived, he knew he was right. The dream was not impossible. The Omo River was doable, and his career as a writer, professional adventurer, and head of an adventure-travel company was launched.

  The Omo River was intense. At one point a crocodile locked its jaws on the front of Bangs’s inflatable raft and the three passengers had to row frantically for ten minutes until the croc finally let go.

  But Richard Bangs, who has also published numerous books, was faced with his biggest challenge a few years later when circumstances led even him to say can’t.

  Up to then, he had had nothing but success. He named his adventure-travel company, Sobek, after the crocodile god that rules over the Omo River. The company provides some of the most exciting and exhilirating adventures for clients that you can imagine. By the mid-1970s Bangs was, as he said, “pushing the envelope further and further. I became too cocky.”

  He did it not only in the adventure world but also in the business world. For him, the two went hand in hand. Bangs helped organize a run of the Baro River, a major tributary of the White Nile in the rain forest of southwest Ethiopia. To help pay for the trip Bangs allowed a relative novice, although a superb athlete—a professional soccer player—to come on the trip. The lure of money was strong
. The soccer player sold his sports car to come.

  What happened in Ethiopia has haunted Bangs ever since. The raft they were in capsized, and the soccer player and Bangs were thrown off. Bangs initially saved the soccer player’s life in the middle of the water by cutting the boat’s stern line, which had wrapped itself around the sports star’s body. Bangs did this while floating and bouncing through the river with him.

  “Swim for shore!” Bangs yelled. The soccer player nodded, and Bangs headed off to try to rescue the raft. That was the last time anyone saw the young soccer player. Bangs had his own close call as he bounced, unprotected, through the rapids.

  When Bangs regained consciousness after blacking out on the side of the river, he and the others began searching. Ten days later they gave up. The soccer player’s body was never found.

  Bangs gave up adventuring completely. He went to graduate school and received a degree in journalism. Whenever he saw his friends from the adventuring world, he told them they were crazy. He told them of the dangers.

  This would be a very sad story if it weren’t for one thing: the inner fortitude of Richard Bangs. He could only stay away from the world’s great adventures for so long. Eventually he was seduced back to his true love—life as an adventurer.

  Bangs has a theory about all this, and he incorporates it into his business, which today is called Mountain Travel/Sobek. “As I examined it, life without risk is a passionless life—a life not worth living,” he told me. “You know, everybody is capable of pushing themselves beyond inner perceived limits. If they can just take that first step, whole new worlds open up. An enormous number of people say at first they wouldn’t take an adventure vacation. It’s just not part of their personality. But when they do take a trip, you can watch them blossom. They become overpowered by positive feelings. When they come back from an adventure, they apply these changes to their lives.”

  When whole new worlds open up, life becomes fun again. Joy has overwhelming power. When joy is a by-product of work, limits disappear.

  American business has overlooked the power of fun in relation to productivity. Fun exists as a product (for example, in the entertainment business) but not as a tool. It is just another example of how the embalming fluid has soaked into the fabric of most businesses. Fun is discouraged. The implication is that if fun is allowed, work becomes secondary. I challenge that. I know better. If fun and effort are related, success in an open company comes naturally.

  During a recent economic downturn in the retail market Levi Strauss, a fine company, unwittingly put their employees in embalming fluid. The company had built a wonderful new facility with beautiful terraces used for coffee areas and lounges. It would be great for employees to unwind on the terraces—tell a joke, laugh a little, refuel emotionally and mentally.

  But when the market turned down and people had to be laid off, Levi found people were afraid to go into these areas. They did not want to appear to be loafing or having fun. They did not want to endanger their jobs. So the terraces—built to say to employees, we care—stood empty, like a museum piece from a long-ago age of compassion and good economic times.

  Levi solved the problem. They put common work areas, for example those with duplicating machines and postage meters, in these areas so employees could enjoy the space without guilt. Levi tried to incorporate joy into production. It was a step in the right direction.

  It still didn’t solve the problem of why people felt guilty about taking a break, but at least it allowed them to enjoy the new building.

  At The North Face, the company I started in 1968 and built into the industry leader for outdoor equipment, our growth gave us a space problem too. At the time our company was about eight years old, and we needed to fit more employees into our building.

  We knew from industry studies that our sewing-machine operators could work in less space—28 square feet instead of 36 square feet. However, we had been successful because of our loyalty to our workers and because we made their working conditions as comfortable as possible. Each employee had his or her own “territory,” and we didn’t want to disturb that. But we needed the space if we were going to grow. And we were going to grow; no question about that.

  We didn’t want to just take away their space—that would have been demoralizing. Instead, we were honest. We said, look, we have this problem. We want to grow, and we know we can. It will be good for all of us, but we know that if we do, it will require that we take something away from you, some of the space around your machine. It’s not our first choice, but under the circumstances it’s the best choice.

  We then offered something back. It was not the greatest gift an employee ever received. But they knew it came from our hearts, so they accepted it. It was their own personalized nameplate for their work space. Something that identified a part of the company as their very own. Our message was clear: You, the employee, matter. Without you, we could not have had the success we have, and we wouldn’t be able to continue our spectacular growth. By the way, none of our executives ever had their name on their door or desk.

  We took two weeks to explain this, individually, to each production worker. Every one accepted the offer. They had something most production workers never have—pride, identity, and respect.

  The embalming fluid of business can be so many different things. At Levi and The North Face it was as simple as building design. The answer is, as it always is, honesty and compassion coupled with a dash of creativity. Explain the problem; show you care.

  Too many companies do not care. They expect employees to have a Muzak personality, and they run their companies with absolutely no verve.

  Too many employees let themselves get beaten down—they give in to the monarchs in their mahogany castles. They don’t have a let’s-do-something-right attitude. Instead, the attitude is, I won’t piss anyone off. In most companies the employee motto is Cover Thy Butt. If you examine where that attitude originated, inevitably you will find it is also the motto of the executives.

  Once I ran into a flood of embalming fluid like I’d never seen before. It was 1975. I had been invited by a couple of outside directors to New York for a special board meeting of The North Face.

  Our company had always operated on a foundation of exuberance and vibrance. Quality was our forte—we prided ourselves on being the best. We had become the industry leader through product innovation. Our investment was in market dominance for the long term. It was fun to walk the high wire, but there was no pretense in anyone.

  The meeting was held in the University Club, a pretentious mid-Manhattan monument to the Ivy League. The hanging chandeliers sparkled onto the hand-carved mahogany walls, which rose majestically 20 feet from floor to ceiling. It was a hard place for delicate emotions. The curtains were thick velvet and blocked off all light and noise from the outside world. Antiseptic.

  At the University Club, toying with companies was entertainment. Walking into the garish confines, one had to fight the feeling of being a pawn in someone else’s power game. These board members didn’t care about people or quality, only image and control. Their decisions were made totally out of the context of reality. Issues like leadership, humanism, commitment, and vision were ignored. It was our lives, but they didn’t care. The only thing that mattered was the game, where winning and losing are merely words.

  I was invited to attend my own firing by a group of dissident board members. They didn’t put it that way, but we both knew why they had called the meeting. They felt the company had outgrown me, that I was an entrepreneur in a company that called for management. It is a common, and mistaken, venture capitalist assumption that all entrepreneurs are unable to run companies once they grow. They had their MBAs. I had my MBA. They had the money. I had something better—a highly successful company.

  Four of us entered together. We were an hour late when we walked through the marbled entrance and took the elevator to the top floor. We had been trying to work out an agreement to restructure the management
of the company, but we couldn’t. Basically, I had refused. They wanted to push me aside and eliminate the leadership, replacing me with a manager who would acquiesce to their demands. It was our company, everybody’s company, and I wouldn’t sell out. Thus high drama at the University Club. What a joke this was—I still laugh about it with my friends. Here we were, a relatively small company operating on an austere budget, spending thousands just to rent the room only to satisfy the tastes and whims of a few board members. While they talked about results, they didn’t have a clue as to the forced discipline it took to get results. They were spending more for that one get-together than our office supplies bill was for an entire month.

  The room was ridiculous. It was totally out of context for a company that made mountaineering, backpacking, and other wilderness equipment. It wasn’t even one room; it was three. There was a cocktail room with two bars and servants. The second room was the board room, with high-backed leather chairs and a Caucasian testosterone ooze. This was an old boys’ club. The third room, the most elaborate of them all, was for lunch.

  There I was, the iconoclast. They were the icons. In all there were 12 of us at the meeting, including my management. The junior board members preened and postured for their elders. The senior members did the power-word thing, and I must say they were quite good at it. They’d dance and balance jugular tendencies with parliamentary etiquette. It was most impressive. They had become masters at doing something of zero benefit to society. They were diplomatic bullies.

  The chairman of the board and I entered. We explained why we were late, and the game began. I knew it was mine to lose, and I saw that it could slip away very fast. Rather than delay, I invited confrontation.

  My format was simple. I would be honest. “Yes, this year’s earnings forecast was not met,” I said. “But the North Face was the largest and best in the industry, and one of the best small businesses in the country.” There was plenty of documented evidence to prove this. I explained that one problem was the use of aggressive forecasting to motivate employees. The other problem was that we had made a bad hire in the finance department. The individual we had hired failed to set up adequate systems to give us operational control of our inventories. Thus the numbers he reported were inaccurate. When we took physical inventories, there was significant shortfall from his reported members.