High-Stakes Decision Making: the Lessons of Mount Everest
High-Stakes Decision Making: The Lessons of Mount Everest
Published: August 26, 2002
Author: Michael A. Roberto
Executive Summary:
On May 10, 1996, five mountaineers from two teams perished while climbing Mount Everest. Is there anything business leaders can learn from the tragedy? HBS professor Michael A. Roberto used the tools of management to find out. Plus: Q&A with Michael Roberto
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Editor's Note: What went wrong on Mount Everest on May 10, 1996? That day, twenty-three climbers reached the summit. Five climbers, however, did not survive the descent. Two of these, Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, were extremely skilled team leaders with much experience on Everest. As the world's mightiest mountain, Everest has never been a cakewalk: 148 people have lost their lives attempting to reach the summit since 1922.
Newspaper and magazine articles and books—most famously, Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster—have attempted to explain how events got so out of control that particular day. Several explanations compete: human error, weather, all the dangers inherent in human beings pitting themselves against the world's most forbidding peak.
A single cause of the 1996 tragedy may never be known, says HBS professor Michael A. Roberto. But perhaps the events that day hold lessons, some of them for business managers. Roberto's new working paper describes how. Here follows an excerpt from "Lessons From Everest: The Interaction of Cognitive Bias, Psychological Safety, and System Complexity."
Implications for leaders
This multi-lens analysis of the Everest case
Published: August 26, 2002
Author: Michael A. Roberto
Executive Summary:
On May 10, 1996, five mountaineers from two teams perished while climbing Mount Everest. Is there anything business leaders can learn from the tragedy? HBS professor Michael A. Roberto used the tools of management to find out. Plus: Q&A with Michael Roberto
* Easy Print View * E-mail To A Friend * Share Article o Add to Del.ici.ous o Digg this Article o Add to Facebook o Add to Reddit o Seed Newsvine o Technorati Favorite o Stumble It! o Twitter o LinkedIn * E-mail the Editor * Download PDF
Editor's Note: What went wrong on Mount Everest on May 10, 1996? That day, twenty-three climbers reached the summit. Five climbers, however, did not survive the descent. Two of these, Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, were extremely skilled team leaders with much experience on Everest. As the world's mightiest mountain, Everest has never been a cakewalk: 148 people have lost their lives attempting to reach the summit since 1922.
Newspaper and magazine articles and books—most famously, Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster—have attempted to explain how events got so out of control that particular day. Several explanations compete: human error, weather, all the dangers inherent in human beings pitting themselves against the world's most forbidding peak.
A single cause of the 1996 tragedy may never be known, says HBS professor Michael A. Roberto. But perhaps the events that day hold lessons, some of them for business managers. Roberto's new working paper describes how. Here follows an excerpt from "Lessons From Everest: The Interaction of Cognitive Bias, Psychological Safety, and System Complexity."
Implications for leaders
This multi-lens analysis of the Everest case