While Our Managers Debated What Steps To

The Most Important Thing Is To Get The Fish In Quickly And Leave It In The Water. Forget The Hero Pose.

While Our Managers Debated What Steps To Take To Address The Sales And Cash-flow Crisis, I Began To Lead Week-long Employee Seminars In What We Called Philosophies. We'd Take A Busload At A Time To Places Like Yosemite Or The Marin Headlands Above San Francisco, Camp Out, And Gather Under The Trees To Talk. The Goal Was To Teach Every Employee In The Company Our Business And Environmental Ethics And Values.

Just Why Is Yosemite Climbing So Different ? Why Does It Have Techniques, Ethics And Equipment All Of Its Own ? The Basic Reason Lies In The Rock Itself. Nowhere Else In The World Is The Rock So Exfoliated, So Glacier-polished And So Devoid Of Handholds. All Of The Climbing Lines Follow Vertical Crack Systems. Every Piton Crack, Every Handhold Is A Vertical One. Special Techniques And Equipment Have Evolved Through Absolute Necessity.

Hiring People With Diverse Backgrounds Brings In A Flexibility Of Thought And Openness To New Ways Of Doing Things, As Opposed To Hiring Clones From Business Schools Who Have Been Taught A Codified Way Of Doing Business.

Who Are Businesses Really Responsible To? Their Customers? Shareholders? Employees? We Would Argue That It’s None Of The Above. Fundamentally, Businesses Are Responsible To Their Resource Base. Without A Healthy Environment There Are No Shareholders, No Employees, No Customers And No Business.