Читать книгу The Light and Fast Organisation - Hollingworth Patrick - Страница 4

There is a mountain face in Switzerland that from 1933 to 1938 held the attention of the world. Not just the attention of the mountaineering world, but the entire world. A mountain face so steep and imposing that it had become legend: one that, at last count, has killed at least 64 people who have attempted to climb it.

Extending in an unbroken upward thrust for nearly 2 kilometres, this vertical and overhanging face comprised of mixed rock and ice has variously been described as ‘ferociously steep', ‘inaccessible', ‘unclimbable' and ‘murderous'. Known as the Nordwand, German for ‘North Face', it belongs to the 3970-metre-high mountain called the Eiger.

Located in the Bernese Oberland in the northernmost portion of the Alps, the Eiger acts as a weather beacon and attracts the earliest of bad weather moving down from the northern plains of Europe. Not only is the Eiger's North Face incredibly high and steep, it is also somewhat concave, giving it a tendency to collect and amplify storms as they hit. Sunny days and warm temperatures can turn to maelstrom and freezing conditions within minutes, creating blizzards, deadly rockfalls and avalanches. The normal rules for mountain weather just don't seem to apply here.

The Nordwand is a powerful metaphor for the world we are living in today.

At this critical juncture in our history, we too are experiencing unpredictable and violent storms. Fuelled by never before seen and ever more complex interactions between people, places and technology, the sunny days and warm weather of the past are gone and we are now seemingly inundated with maelstrom, freezing conditions, blizzards, rockfalls and avalanches. For most people and most organisations – those that don't have the mindset and skills required to deal with this volatility and uncertainty – it's a terrifying and stressful place to be. It is inherently uncomfortable.

But for the few people and organisations that do have the right mindset and skills, it's actually an incredibly exciting time. There is immeasurable opportunity, unlike any other period in the history of mankind. The purpose of this book is to arm you, the reader, with the right mindset and skills to ensure that you, and the organisation you work for, can experience the excitement and take advantage of the opportunities ahead.

To understand more about the right mindset and skills needed to take advantage of these opportunities, in this book we are going to delve into the world of the mountaineer, a place not commonly associated with meaningful learning beyond superficial colloquialisms about ‘dreaming big', ‘never giving up' and ‘anything is possible if you try hard enough'.

More specifically, we are going into the world of a subset of mountaineers who climb light and fast, an approach known as alpine style. (We call this type of mountaineer the alpinist.)

There is arguably no type of person on earth who has a better understanding of the skills, knowledge and mindset needed to deal with the type of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity that the world is enshrouded in today. And so, throughout this book, we are going to learn from the alpinist.

But just for a moment, we must go back to Switzerland in 1935.

Standing above the beautiful alpine meadows of the tourist resorts of Kleine Scheidegg and Grindelwald, in the 1930s the North Face of the Eiger became a global stage against which a group of young German and Austrian men pitted their lives in a tragic fashion. Although the mountain had previously been climbed via comparatively easier routes such as the south and the Mittellegi ridges, no-one had ever climbed directly up the North Face.

For the young men involved, each seemingly oblivious to their soon-to-be starring roles on the world stage, their motivation to climb the North Face was the intrinsic joy and challenge that mountaineering provides. But Hitler's Third Reich seized upon their feats as an opportunity to showcase the talent and supposed superiority of their citizens to the world. (It was even reported that following the Munich Olympics Adolf Hitler offered gold medals to any German or Austrian climbers who could successfully scale the face). And so during the mid 1930s, as Europe slowly lumbered towards another world war, the global spotlight was centred very much on the Eiger's main stage, the North Face.

The first serious attempt occurred in the summer of 1935, when two young Bavarians named Max Sedlmayr and Karl Mehringer set up camp in the meadows below the face. With youthful exuberance on their side and the best equipment available at the time, they were as ready as could be for the challenge above them. Regarded as quiet but very experienced and hardened climbers, the pair spent a number of weeks reconnoitring the lower part of the route before launching their final upward assault on the face under clear blue skies very early in the morning of Wednesday 21 August.

As crowds gathered throughout the day to watch via telescopes the pair's progress from Kleine Scheidegg and Grindelwald, Sedlmayr and Mehringer made rapid upwards progress. By the time the last of the summer twilight was fading in the west, they had climbed the easier lower third of the face and were looking likely to succeed: perhaps two more days on the face and they would have it in the bag. Thursday morning dawned clear and the pair recommenced their upward push.

However, the increasingly difficult terrain of mixed rock and ice slowed their progress considerably. Whereas on the first day they had climbed 900 vertical metres, by the end of the second day they had only covered a further 300 vertical metres. Although the gallery of spectators in Kleine Scheidegg and Grindelwald had been initially confident of the pair's success, by the end of the second day many were questioning whether they had any chance before the next storm arrived. And rightly so. The Friday morning brought with it thick mist and fog, an eerie calm before the storm, and by the end of that day neither Sedlmayr nor Mehringer had been sighted on the face for some hours.

On Friday night, the calm weather finally broke and all of Saturday and Sunday a fierce storm lashed the mountain with thunder and lightning, strong winds and snow. The night-time temperatures in Kleine Scheidegg dropped to –8 degrees Celsius – how cold must it have been up on the face? During a short period of respite on Sunday afternoon the storm backed off and afforded the spectators in the valley the briefest of views of the face, where they momentarily saw Sedlmayr and Mehringer bravely battling onwards and upwards. This was quite remarkable, especially after five bitterly cold days and four nights on the face. But the reality was that Sedlmayr and Mehringer had climbed themselves into a trap: the icy conditions had frozen both the rock and their ropes, making descent impossible. Soon enough the clouds closed in again, and the pair were never seen alive again.

Numerous searches were conducted in the days and weeks following their disappearance, but no trace of the men could be found. It was only on 19 September, nearly a month after they had been last seen, that a search plane piloted by a famous German flying ace passing extremely close to the face spotted the body of one of the men, knee-deep in the snow and frozen standing upright, still a long way beneath the summit. The North Face had claimed its first human lives.

The following summer saw a second serious attempt on the face, made this time by a young but skilled four-man party comprising two Germans and two Austrians, seemingly unperturbed by the previous year's events. If the expedition of 1935 was a tragedy, the events of 1936 were truly macabre.

After four days the team had made excellent progress up the first two-thirds of the face, but they were forced into a sudden retreat when a rockfall caused a head injury to one of the team members. Over the ensuing 24 hours, and in a worsening storm, the four climbers progressively succumbed to the elements, with the last climber literally freezing to death and whispering his infamous final words, I'm finished, within an arm's reach of the rescue party. These events are to this day considered to be among the greatest mountaineering tragedies ever documented.

It was in the summer of 1938 that success on the North Face of the Eiger was finally achieved. Again, a team of four young men comprising two Germans and two Austrians tackled the face, and after four days of considerable hard work and suffering, accompanied by the requisite storms, rockfalls and avalanches and stories of near death, the party stood atop the narrow summit. The celebrations were, however, all too brief, as before long the fog of World War II descended on Europe and feats of daring on the great mountain were relegated to history.

Over the ensuing decades, more attempts were made on the face, some successful and many unsuccessful. Many more climbers lost their lives. But the world had moved on. No longer did an ascent of the world's most dangerous mountain face garner the attention of the global spotlight. Not, that is, until 2008.