High Tech to High Peaks : Mountain a Metaphor for Goals in Business

Battling 100 m.p.h. winds and snow on a knife-edged ridge on Mt. Everest might be a bit more perilous than starting up a high-tech company, but a Silicon Valley businesswoman sees plenty of similarities.

Ellen Lapham, 42, has spent most of her career in marketing and public relations for new ventures, including some spectacular successes--such as Tandem Computers Inc.--and a few flops.

She’s in training now, awaiting an Aug. 22 departure for Tibet with a team of professional climbers hoping to put the first American woman on the 29,028-foot summit of the world’s tallest mountain and send hang gliders soaring over the peak with movie cameras.

In-Home Training Course

Lapham marches up and down the steps of her luxurious home in a wealthy wooded enclave on the edge of Silicon Valley, with weights on her ankles, dumbbells in each hand and a 25-pound sack of flour in her backpack.

While the rest of the “Americans to China” expedition have considerable experience, including the two other women--Heidi Benson of Salt Lake City and Catherine Freer of Boulder, Colo.--this is Lapham’s first major climb. The expedition is being led by Steve McKinney of Squaw Valley, Calif., a five-time world record holder in speed skiing.

Lapham, the smallest member of the team at 5-foot-2, has done ice and rock climbing in the United States and decided to try Everest after trekking up a “really pretty little” 20,000-foot mountain in Nepal last year.

Lapham’s biggest asset, though, may be enthusiasm, marked by a perpetual broad smile and mental toughness honed in the business world. She is the expedition’s fund raiser, putting together the needed $300,000 it costs for 15 American climbers and about a dozen Sherpas, but she’s deadly serious about reaching the top and comparing it with her business experiences.

Looking for Parallels

“My first interest is climbing the mountain and getting to the top,” said Lapham, who sold a cherished Ansel Adams photo to raise money for the trek. “But because of my background in business and particularly in start-up organizations here in the valley, I’m looking at the parallels between what it takes to plan and execute a climb and what it takes to do it in small business.”

In both ventures, a core team comes together to take on a big job, works hard and has lofty goals.

“There’s a large degree of ambiguity and a high amount of risk,” she said. “The outcome is projected to be positive but there may be things that get in the way of getting there.

“In the case of the mountain, it can be weather, avalanches, team sickness and other factors,” she said. “In the case of a start-up, it can be a technological breakthrough that doesn’t happen in time, or you run out of capital or the market disappears, or a major competitor comes and avalanches your market.”

Lapham plans to keep a daily journal during the climb and put it into perspective with the help of experts in organizational theory on her return.

“The mountain is a wonderful metaphor for the kind of thing that high goal-setting people do with their lives, particularly in Silicon Valley, where the goal-setting has been especially high on the part of entrepreneurs,” she said. “There are a lot of people in the business world who climb mental mountains every day.”

Value in Experience

Lapham said she wants to see whether some of her experiences in the valley can help her on the mountain.

“That has to to do with teamwork, the way people self-manage, how they handle day-to-day pressure, how you keep goals in sight, how the team leader keeps everybody in line,” she said. “On a mountain, you’ve got a little bit tougher job than you do here, because there’s an immediacy in your environment of weather and time. The pressure isn’t quite as apparent when you’re doing a start-up.

“If you’re writing a piece of software and trying to get an operating system breakthrough, you’re not working any less hard, but it’s a little less threatening on a day-to-day basis, to your ego or to your body,” she said.

“But having a bank call in a loan is like having an avalanche or finding that the route that you’ve established doesn’t work and you have to go back to base camp and try another way up the mountain.”

Business Background

Lapham has an MBA from Stanford and marketing and public relations experience with new products for such companies as SCM, General Electric, Memorex, Apple Computer and Tandem. She started a computer music company, Syntauri, in 1978 but liquidated it in 1984. After Everest, she plans to work with a voice recognition company.

She said she doesn’t worry about death on a mountain that has claimed some of the world’s top climbers, but conceded she’s concerned about frostbite.

“Frostbite means maybe you lose part of a finger or toe,” she said. “That’s no big deal, relative to the absolute goal and the sense of satisfaction that we can have in getting to the summit of Everest. But if I can’t get up the mountain because I’ve got to nurse my frostbit foot, I’d be darned disappointed.”