He is 73, but he still seems unstoppable. “Thinking about stopping is thinking about dying,” Sir Ranulph Fiennes told Julius Baer last October in Barcelona. In the capital of Catalonia, which during those days was reaching a new peak in its political conflict with the Spanish government, Sir Ranulph shared his wisdom from five decades of fighting against the elements with 80 external asset managers at Julius Baer’s Annual Intermediaries Conference Europe. Judging from the positive reception of his messages by the audience, there is a lot that the corporate world can learn from a living legend like Sir Ranulph. We have put together the ten most valuable lessons – in text and in video.
Lesson #1: Becoming an explorer
I was in the army, I was fighting in Arabia in a war, but I had not passed any school exams. I originally came from South Africa – I’m not saying the education is bad there, but I did not pass any exams. So I had to find something that I could do that does not require huge intelligence. What being a polar explorer does require, however, is looking very carefully at a problem, working out where the difficulties of the problem are, and attacking it from that side with the right people, the right team.
I would love to say that anybody can be an explorer. That’s not the case, however. You have to examine very carefully if the project is genuinely difficult. Many expeditions do this, do that, but if you look at them carefully, they are not difficult, they are not genuine explorations. It has to take more than crossing from one side of Barcelona to the other side of Barcelona.
Lesson #2: Entering uncharted territory
You always go for breaking a world record because that’s how you get the big sponsors. To give you an example: in the 1980s, human beings had never been around Earth’s surface vertically, via the two poles. So we [Ranulph Fiennes and Charles Burton] started at 0, which is Greenwich in London, and went slowly for three years [2 September 1979 to 29 August 1982] around Earth, never flying one metre of the 56,000-kilometre journey. That was a record that had never been done.
So what do we do when entering uncharted territory? We look at little bits. Some 100 years ago, Shackleton managed to cross the Antarctic towards the South Pole, but then he didn’t quite get to the South Pole. Why? You look at it carefully, you learn from previous experience. If you are going into an area, as we did in 1980, which for 900 miles to the South Pole is unexplored – nobody has been there, people do not know how high it is, there are no polar satellites, no overflights – then you cannot look at previous experience. You are going into the unknown. That is genuine exploration, genuine pioneering.
Lesson #3: Fighting the elements
In a polar expedition you’re fighting the ice, you’re fighting the wind, you’re fighting the moon, which is changing the tides, and so on, and the best you can do is getting a meteorological forecast. You may have to wait because if the tide comes up, the ice on top will crack up. You can’t do it when it’s dark because then you cannot use your experience of knowing which ice is old ice.
On the sea, ice grows by one metre a year – the old, multi-year ice is much deeper and therefore the current is faster. So those bits of ice – which will be rather grey than blue – are good and strong. This is the sort of experience you have to have in order to deal with ice. And you can’t train for it until you get there.
Lesson #4: Preparing for the worst case
If you encounter very bad polar weather – in the Arctic and the Antarctic there is no meteorological forecasting, so we don’t know what the weather is going to be – and you set out in the Arctic Ocean and find that the ice is breaking up, you must be prepared for it. Because you’re in the middle of an area and you can’t head for safety. You must have the right equipment for any bad-weather situation. As the leader of the expedition, I am to blame if I’m not ready for very bad weather at all times. You have to think pessimistically.
Lesson #5: Dealing with setbacks
Unexplored situations usually result in setbacks, and when that happens, you have to say, “If I carry on, there’s going to be death, so we will go back and try again next year” – everything is seasonal, so if you’re there in July, you may have to wait until next July.
For instance, I was trying to be the oldest British person to climb Mount Everest for a charity. It was in 2005 in Tibet, and I had a massive heart attack near the top. I had to recover my health before I could come back again and try from the other side, Nepal. But this time I was confronted with the death of several people – one of them was my Sherpa, another was my Sherpa’s father – and that was not good for the morale of the team, of course. So I had to wait again. I finally managed the Everest in year 3, and this time there were no problems.
When things go wrong, you learn from it, and you come back with different equipment or at a different time of the year. You have to be very flexible.
Lesson #6: Getting fit for an expedition
Preparing for an expedition has both mental and physical aspects. Mentally, you need to look very, very carefully at the project, learn from other people’s mistakes. Physically, it gets more difficult the older you get. You have to spend more time training, but you also have to make a living – nobody pays you a penny for the preparations – planning the expedition, organising it, getting the sponsors.
One time we needed 1,900 sponsors just for one expedition. That’s seven years’ work without pay. You have to make a living, so I have to give lectures, I have to write books, and in the time that’s left you have to say, “I will do 30 minutes of press-ups every morning before breakfast” – otherwise your body starts getting too old. You go for a one-hour run every day. But when you’re 60, the run is not called a run – it’s called a jog. And when you’re 70, it’s called a shuffle. But you still have to keep trying to keep fit.
Lesson #7: Picking the right people
You have to choose your team very well. I get applications from people but I don’t pay them to come along, there’s no financial gain to be had. So I start off with people who are looking at it from the right angle, people who have already looked at polar exploration work and who know that they’re going into a dangerous situation. They must be ready for it. There may be eight people in the team, and they all know that if one person is mentally or physically weak, that person can spoil everything, can jeopardize the entire project.
Lesson #8: Raising funds
Doing expeditions is very expensive and you therefore require the ability to raise money by persuading people that they will get what they want so that they give you what you want. It’s quid pro quo at all times. A sponsor wants publicity. A company, such as Julius Baer, is going to want its name on the jackets. You understand that, but the BBC does not want names on jackets, so you have to be quite clever.
Last year I needed an icebreaker to go to Antarctica, at a cost of 2 million US dollars. To persuade a bank to give us 2 million dollars, we wrote the name of the bank on the side of the icebreaker. You have to work out what they want in order to get what you want.
Lesson #9: Resisting climate change
Climate change in Antarctica does not affect us because you have 4,000-metre mountains and then you have 1 kilometre of ice on top of the mountains. So even though the ice is getting less, you don’t see it because there’s so much of it.
In the Arctic Ocean, however, there’s been a huge change. In the 1970s, I waterproofed our sledges in case there was some water on the way to the North Pole. By the 1990s, only 20 years later, I was designing them like canoes because there was so much water. So yes, there’s been a very, very big change in the Arctic, which is already affecting travel on the ice.
Lesson#10: Keeping the fire burning
Thinking about stopping is thinking about dying. So I would only want to stop if I’m forced to do so by something going wrong with my body.