Alumni Profiles

Wharton Executive MBA trek to Mount Everest inspires new insights into leadership and teamwork -- plus a few ideas for start-up ventures

The air is thin and the tea is tepid at the Himalayan village of Chukhung, nestled at 15,584 feet among an array of the world’s greatest mountains. We’ve been climbing since 3 a.m., roused from our slumber by our head Sherpa, Ang Jangbu, a Mount Everest veteran. The objective today: a peak more than 2,000 vertical feet above the village whose views, says our guidebook, are “staggering.” The early morning sun is warming the air and lighting the summits. We’re pumped.

We are reaching the high point of our two-week “WEMBA Leadership Trek to Mt. Everest.” The night before we had slept fitfully near the hamlet of Dingboche, at 14,270 feet the highest permanent settlement of the region, its treeless plateau already placing us at an elevation near the crest of the Swiss Alps. The day before, our team of 19 trekkers had been jarred by a potentially serious case of altitude sickness. But now we’re feeling fit, and one of the world’s great panoramas beckons above.

We have organized this trek in the Himalayas’ famous Khumbu region to stretch our imagination and expand our working concepts of leadership and teamwork. One of us — Mike Useem — has been teaching the WEMBA (Wharton Executive MBA) leadership course during the past several years, and the other — Ed Bernbaum — has been researching the role of mountain metaphors in leadership and organizing treks through India, Nepal and Tibet for many years. Together, we’ve sought to create a unique learning experience for WEMBA graduates who are looking to deepen their mastery of personal and team leadership.

The Himalayas offer a unique environment for continuing personal development. Mountain climbers, like the mountains they climb, hold a central place in our culture's mythology, a paradigm for how individuals striving to reach a goal can achieve what others label impossible. But reaching a summit is usually far more than personal achievement, for it almost always depends on collective effort, with the contribution of each required for the success of all.

TREK READINGS

We converge on Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, a few days after Penn’s 1998 commencement ceremonies. Arriving by air from destinations as diverse as San Francisco and Santiago, we each complete a landing card whose choices for arriving must be unique in the world: “holiday pleasure,” “trekking,” or “mountaineering.” The next morning we’re back at the airport for a 7 a.m. flight to Lukla, a tiny tilted runway built by Sir Edmund Hillary on a high plateau as a gateway to the Mount Everest region. The choice of domestic airlines leaves no doubt where we are: Mountain Air, Buddha Airways and Everest Air.

The pilot aims his aircraft at the Lukla runway and his angle seems better for dive-bombing than safe-landing. At the last second, however, he pulls up, we drop onto the gravel surface, and a minute later we find ourselves at 9,320 feet among a swirling multitude of trekkers and Sherpas.

Before setting forth up the trail to Mount Everest, we assemble for a “before” photograph featuring 11 recent graduates of the WEMBA program: Mun Fenton, Jan Hartmann, Anne Libby, Leontina Marcotulli, Randy Ment, Evelyn Nagel, Daniel Neal, Anita Orellana, Sara Sutherland, Tim Urekew, and Chris Witt. Besides the two of us, they are accompanied by two brothers, Eugene Nagel and Pedro Orellana; a sister, Marialidia Marcotulli; a former WEMBA student employee, Sabrina Lowe; a faculty member, Peter Dean; and a daughter, Andrea Useem.

Disparate motives have brought us together. One participant intends to conquer the high anxieties of his workplace by mastering the high altitude challenges of the trek. Another seeks the opportunity to explore management issues in an environment totally different from the daily routine back home. A third is looking for a “once in a lifetime experience,” and a fourth says she wants to learn more about leadership. A fifth person confesses that he’s come in part as a reconnaissance for a possible climb of Mount Everest.

To make the most of our itinerary, we have prepared a 16-page trek “syllabus,” a detailed outline of our daily destinations and trailside seminars. Each day of the trek, two of the participants assume leadership responsibilities, explaining our destination, assigning trail tasks and organizing special events. We’ve already steeped ourselves in mountaineering narratives and studies of Eastern cultures, digesting a list of trek readings and even a “bulkpack” with excerpts on cross-cultural leadership, Tibetan Buddhism and Sherpa society.