Mt.

Everest 1996 Case Study

Emre Barış Tamer
Burak Demirgök

Q1)
Mountain Madness and Adventure Consultants Expeditions both were claimed unique
and valuable position – climbing the highest mountain in the World. As a link between
climbing team and guides to its environment, their climbing strategy faced with bunch of
problem in the beginning. Effectively implemented strategy relies upon 3 main factors
which are consistent and clear long term goals, profound understanding of the competitive
environment and objective appraisel of resources. Guides are obsessed about their long
term goal which is carry the clients to the Everest Summit. Problems with the
environment is in this case, their delayed/missed essential supplies to be delivered to base
due to customs problem. While waiting for the supplies to arrive at camp, suitable weather
conditions were disappearing which eventually contributes to failure of business strategy.
Oxygen canisters are extremely essential for the whole operation since air gets thinner in
the higher altitudes. However, due to differences between intended and emergent strategy,
their tactics brought them to the failure at every implementation through process of
carrying clients from base to summit.

Since clients&guides invested heavily both their time and money for the expedition,
guides did not considered cancelling the event. This failure of strategic fit mainly occured
because of overconfidence of guides since they have made it to top many times before.
Clients were not experienced as them which lead to mismatch of plans.

As he said:

“Experience is overrated. It’s not the altitude that’s important, it’s your attitude. . . .
We’ve got the big E figured out, we’ve got it totally wired. These days, I’m telling
you, we’ve built a yellow brick road to the summit”
brought the disaster.
Q2)

First of all, what happened in expedition have more than one reason. There are several
hierarchical distortions and many other distortions within the team especially in guiders. I
want to start with the main characters who are Rob Hall and Scott Fisher. Both are very
skillful, and they know what to do while climbing the Everest summit. However, they
both fail on the leadership over the group. What I understand from text is that Fisher had
some about trusting in team leader. On May 6, the expedition started and some of the
client felt ill and Fisher decided to take him back to base camp. His decision questioned
by other guiders in case. This can be shown that there is a problem about hierarchy in
team. In order to become successful organization, there are things to implement which are
coordination, cooperation and etc. In this case, there are lack of coordination and
cooperation and also there is a strong competition between Hall and Fisher and all of these
things led to the bad things in Everest. One hand we have Rob Hall who climbed Everest
4 times and other hand we Have Scott Fisher who is good at as much as Hall. However,
Rob proved himself to lead 39 client to the summit and this situation gave him well
respected over Scoot. Moreover, as I said before cooperation and coordination is
important for businesses; for me Rob seems to be organized and detail oriented, however
Scott is disorganized. Management and Strategic planning systems have caused the
problems.

Q3)
Firms today are surviving in an environment that is been changing and challenging each
and every day. To survive and sustain profitable and growing business it is essential to
have a suitable strategy that consists of suitable plans and tactics to achieve it. What is
important is to have a mechanism to process the challenging situation in the environment
and produce/review plans and tactics to keep on the right track as stated in the strategy.
Such flexibility might not be for most businesses but when there are unexpected
circumstances occurred, it is very vital to understand and react to them without getting out
of track. Pushing into limits while conditions are challenging is a risky game to play.
Although it is not desired, one has to know when to give up or fight back to carry on
operations. Overconfidence blinds the managers to take small variable changes into
consideration. Therefore, the whiplash effect is inevitable. Those in charge to guide the
business according to strategy, have to establish a secure and solid control mechanism
both for their actions and their plans in changing business environment.
THE ABILITY TO "CUT YOUR LOSSES" REMAINS A DIFFICULT CHALLENGE
AS WELL AS A HALLMARK OF COURAGEOUS LEADERSHIP.

— MICHAEL A. ROBERTO