PART I – Chapter 2 – The “Roof of Africa”

Don’t be afraid of the space between your dreams and reality. If you

can dream it, you can make it so.

— Belva Davis

I am standing on a ridge at an altitude of 4,500 meters and looking across the high desert plain at Mount Kilimanjaro. After four long days of climbing, “Kili” is only 10 kilometers (6 miles) away, but from here, it feels like it will take a lifetime to reach.

My head and chest are in intense pain—worse than anything I have ever felt. I have no energy. I don’t feel like doing anything!

“What am I doing here?” I silently ask myself.

Then I hear it. “Ten Up and Ten Down!” yells one of my team members. One by one, our spirits lift and we refocus on the goal; surprisingly, I put one foot in front of the other and start moving.

What does this scene have to do with Vision, Mission, Values, Strategy, Execution, and Leadership?

For you to understand, I have to take you back six days to the beginning….

I had been working in Romania as an executive with Vodafone, and my wife and children were there with me, but they had decided to return home to Vancouver for the summer. I decided to take advantage of their absence by having an adventure.

On July 1st, 2006, I flew from Romania to Kilimanjaro to fulfill a dream to climb one of the highest peaks in the world. I picked “Kili” because I figured it was the only peak of that altitude (5,895 meters or 19,160 feet) that is not a technical climb. Kilimanjaro is located in Tanzania just 3 degrees south of the equator. It rises majestically out of the jungle. Below it, Africa’s wildest animals roam and the locals eke out an existence growing bananas and coffee.

July 1st came way too fast. For months I had been lazily training for my climb—thinking it was “just a trek” and would not be technical. “How hard can it be?” I thought. I never could have been more wrong!

Four months earlier, I had been part of an eight-man group of ex-pat executives from Bucharest who were going to make the climb. The “Dream” had started a year earlier with a bunch of guys I was running with on Sundays. Anyway, as life would have it, the guys started dropping out for various reasons (hang nail, family reunion, had to wash his hair, etc.)

I decided to carry on and go it alone.

The flight to the postage stamp of an airstrip at Kilimanjaro International Airport with KLM took ten hours. The beauty was that Kili is in the same time zone as Romania so there was no jet-lag. The airport consisted of this tiny little paved strip of a runway (it must have been an aviator’s nightmare to set down there the massive Boeing 777 we were in) and a small tin-roofed shack that was the terminal building. The doors of the plane opened and 350 people filed out onto the tarmac and into the Customs area, which was hot, humid, and mosquito infested. To top it off, only one Customs Agent was on duty to sell entry visas and process everyone’s paperwork. I was in the middle of the pack, and it took me two hours to get through it all. The good news, of course, was that I did not have to wait for my baggage once I cleared Customs.

Finally, out of the airport and on the ground in Tanzania, I was met by the tour company representative and was loaded into a Land Rover for the three hour drive over what was supposed to be a road to the base of Mount Kilimanjaro.

When I checked into the Kibo Hotel at 11 p.m., I was looking forward to a good night’s sleep after a very long day of travelling. After the clerk at the desk gave me this massive skeleton key, I made my way through a thick garden to my room, which from the outside, looked like a very small tool shed.

Remember this part for the end of this story! I inserted the key into the lock, turned it, and the lock made this very authoritarian “Clunk” as it freed the door from the latch. The door creaked open and I reached inside for the light switch. Nothing. I opened my duffle bag and felt around for my flashlight. Flicking on the flashlight revealed a small room that very much looked like it was outfitted from the local prison surplus shop. Small bed, paper thin mattress draped with a mosquito net, and a prison issue toilet (Read: a hole in the ground) that doubled as a drain for the handheld shower sprayer thingy hanging from the wall. A bedside lamp had no shade—just a naked bulb. There were two windows in the room, but neither one of them had glass—just metal mesh mortared into the cement walls. I rolled my sleeping bag out onto the bed and crawled inside the netting while thinking I was about to sleep like a baby. Wrong!

Soon after I switched the light out, it started. Something in the room with multiple legs and built like a Chicago Bears linebacker started marching around inside the room. Mosquitoes buzzed in formation like Stuka dive bombers, each taking turns peeling off and making a strafing run at my mosquito netting. Just as I was dozing off from pure exhaustion, the rooster in the henhouse next to my room decided to wake all of Africa at 4:00 a.m. This sound set off a chain reaction of neighboring testosterone burdened roosters competing for the title of the most annoying poultry of the day. Not to be outdone, all the local dogs decided to join in on the party. Ungowa! I was thinking, where is one of those groups of African Safari hunters when you need it?

Seven a.m. finally came! After breakfast, I went to the trip briefing and was introduced for the first time to the team with whom I would climb. I was grouped in with nine other climbers. A young couple from Denmark, three Irish girls who, at the young age of twenty-nine, had been all over the world on multiple adventures, three Irish lads who were raising money for children’s cancer research, and my tent and climbing partner, a Lebanese-Canadian guy who worked for Phillip Morris in Lithuania.

It was a great balance between the soft-spoken, easy-going nature of the Danes, the lively zest for life of the six Irish who constantly told jokes and taught us new words, the Lebanese guy with the Canadian passport, and myself. There was instant chemistry and never a dull moment!

The guide giving us the briefing was very, very thorough—right down to the pain we would be in as we gained more altitude toward the peak—and the severe temperatures, the wind, the exhaustion, and how the guide team would evacuate us from the mountain in an emergency. I was sitting there thinking, “Great, I paid how much for this again? I am supposed to be on vacation here!” The Irish guys were saying, “Great, a whole week without beer. This sucks!”

We were told that only 50 percent of those who attempt the peak make it (on the tour company’s Web site, it says 87 percent who attempt the climb make it—I guess the 37 percent is the difference between Operations and Marketing!). Women and asthmatics stand a better chance of making it than do most very fit men—women because they can produce red blood cells faster than men (critical for dealing with oxygen deprivation), and asthma sufferers because they are better at dealing with lack of oxygen.

After the briefing, we all had to submit our equipment to an inspection to ensure we had warm enough clothing and sleeping bags and adequate personal emergency supplies. Once all were approved, we were off to waiting Land Rovers for the two-hour drive around the base of the mountain to our starting point.

The ride was over very rough, red volcanic dirt roads through the jungle and many villages. Each village we came across, the road would be lined with hundreds of children smiling and waving at us as we drove by. It was amazing—they had nothing, but they were always happy looking and clean. A cultural and regional note: Tanzanians have large families—often five kids or more. Fifty percent of Tanzanian adults have HIV or full blown AIDS. Not until 2005 did the Tanzanian Government finally admit to the general population that unprotected sex caused the spread of HIV and AIDS. Until then, the Minister of Health was telling people that HIV was not a sexually transmitted disease. As we drove through these villages, I couldn’t help but think of the millions of orphans there will be in the coming years.

So much for clean clothes! When we arrived at the launching point for the climb, we were all covered from top to toe with a thick layer of red dust from the roads. Our hair was red, our eyelashes were red, and one Irish lad’s teeth were even red because he had spent the whole trip smiling! We were at 1,900 meters in elevation; the hot humid air from the airport the night before was now replaced with cool, dryer air, and NO BUGS! We were still in jungle-type vegetation with thick foliage and the occasional monkey peering out to look at the new batch of “Whities.”

It was here that we met the entire support team. Our climbing team would be supported by the head guide (whom we had already met), three assistant guides, a summit porter (whose job was to be last in the procession and collect any dead bodies), a head cook (this man turned out to be a genius! the meals he prepared were amazing!), four helping porters (they helped the cook in camp and carried very heavy things) and twenty porters (they carried very, very heavy things!). Our support team members were all very tall, very sinewy, with skin blacker than coal, and when they smiled, which was all the time, their teeth were whiter than snow! Their personal belongings for the week fit into a very small backpack (Strange, I thought, because of the freezing temperatures we had been warned about). Each porter carried a supply load of 40 kilos (90 pounds) of other equipment from tents, cooking equipment, and food to our personal equipment— and they carried it gracefully in large packages upon their heads! We “tourists,” carried a backpack consisting of our clothes for the day, 6 liters of water (drinking massive amounts of water is the number one defense against altitude sickness—I ended up drinking about 10 liters of water each day and going into the bush every twenty minutes to relieve myself) and our emergency supplies. The sum total of the weight that my sorry ass would haul each day was 20 pounds!

The porters set off up the trail through the jungle with us following closely behind. After five minutes, they were gone. All twenty-four of the porters with their 100 pounds of extra stuff vanished in the distance. Meanwhile, we plodded along under the watchful eyes of our guides, stopping occasionally to take pictures of the wildlife (giraffes, monkeys, elephants way in the distance, flamingos, baboons) and very often to pee! This part of Tanzania has no predatory animals so we never had to worry about anything with big teeth and bad breath stopping by to see how tasty we might be—although, I did remind myself of that old jungle law: “You need only be faster than the slowest member in the group!”

After a relatively easy four hours of walking, we emerged from the jungle at 2,500 meters in elevation and into vegetation called “Moraine.” It wasn’t scrub brush and it wasn’t trees either. It consisted of heather-like bushes that stood five feet tall and poinsettia (the same as the Christmas plants) bushes that stood about ten feet tall. Weird! This spot was also the site of our first camp.

The porters, who had left us in the dust four hours earlier, had completely set up camp. Our tents were set up. Two cook tents and a mess tent were complete. Water had been fetched, boiled, and was now sitting in cooling pots awaiting our empty camel packs for re-fills. The smell of dinner was wafting in the air and tea and cookies were ready—as if I didn’t feel inadequate enough earlier, I couldn’t believe what they had accomplished ahead of us!

Dinner that night was chicken vegetable soup, fresh fish, grilled vegetables and potatoes, fresh bread, fresh mango, and pound cake. It was amazing! We ate like we had been adrift on a raft for weeks. The cool, thin mountain air made for big appetites.

Sitting around with the team in the mess tent after dinner, our group got a chance to talk together for the first time since we had met twelve hours earlier. We were from four different cultures. Among us were a marketing executive, a student, a journalist, two civil engineers, a middle manager, a medical lab technician, a teacher, a librarian, and myself—a sales executive doing a turnaround in Romania for Vodafone.

What was absolutely amazing about our group were the richness of the questions and the profoundness of the answers. For a time, I sat quietly and listened intently—blown away by what was unfolding in front of me. The conversations started to map out what we, as business leaders, would pay thousands of dollars to a consulting firm to facilitate!

My new teammates were asking things like:

What do you think it will feel like to stand on the top of Kilimanjaro?

Will we all make it?

How will you feel if you do not make it?

The answers I heard (from people with different lives, different circumstances, different cultures) were passionate, full of energy, and vibrant in detail. Obviously, we each had been thinking about this trip for a very long time. After only a few minutes, it dawned on me that my new teammates were describing their own personal visions. The “what” for where they were currently going with their lives.

Equally amazing was that no one got hung up on “not making it” to the top of the mountain. For them, optimism seemed to abound—something I find frequently in people who have prepared for and lived for something in their minds for a long time.

The conversations then blended into a simple sentence that summarized how connected we had become with each other in half a day, and what we wanted to achieve by the end of the week. We were ten in number, so “Ten Up and Ten Down” became our mantra.

“Wow!” I thought. “Ten Up and Ten Down.” This was our vision as a group. Like all great vision statements, it was simple, straightforward, clear, and compelling! It instantly gave us all a common focus.

Every successful leader and his or her respective successful business needs to have a clear and compelling vision of “What Good Looks Like” in order to motivate and inspire a team to move toward a goal that, in the beginning, seems challenging and maybe even unattainable. My disparate teammates and I had, in a few short minutes, without the help of consultants, mapped out a vision worthy of framing on the boardroom wall!

It didn’t stop there. Right on cue, I next heard questions like:

What is important to you?

If you could take one thing to the top of the mountain, what would it be?

Incredible! Personal values were coming out. And as in all great teams and businesses that I have been a leader of, it was easy to see common personal values and how they linked to the vision—

values like integrity, loyalty, determination, love for family and friends, passion, fun, and living life to the max!

The banter was that easy, but still startling to me as a business leader who knows how important it is to have a vision aligned with values; otherwise, achievement is futile.

The exchange then shifted to questions about:

Why do you want to do this?

Why Kilimanjaro?

You just can’t script stuff like this! Purpose. Mission. The “Why” in our “What’s.” What drives people to do what they do? In business, a vision is just words on the wall unless the organization knows exactly what it wants to be known for among its team members and in the communities it serves….

The questions that were being asked, the things that were going through my team’s minds. The Purpose, Vision and Mission we created for ourselves. I want you to think about this with your teams. Do you have a clear Purpose? Vision? Mission? If not, then why? How can you create one?

Robert Murray is a Vancouver, BC based Business Strategy Consultant, #1 Best Selling Author, and International Keynote Speaker. For further advice, insight and inspiration on how to unlock your inner leader, follow Robert on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

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