Daniele Struppa walked into Jim Doti’s office in 2006, and saw a photo of him standing atop a mountain peak, next to a makeshift cross fashioned out of spare poles, climbing gear and tape.
That’s when he knew the Chapman University provost job was his to lose.
Doti, an avid mountaineer, had been photographed at the summit of Aconcagua, a 22,837-foot peak in the Andes Mountains and the highest point in the Southern Hemisphere. Struppa had scaled the Argentinian mountain several years earlier.
“At that point, I knew I was going to get the job because I realized that we had this incredible connection,” said Struppa, who took over from Doti as president of the Orange-based university 10 years later.
The connection extends beyond the Chapman president’s office.
Orange County’s Base Camp for extreme mountain climbing is a fellowship of business leaders, lawyers, dealmakers and other notable executives who’ve invested time, energy and not an insignificant amount of money into following their passion.
Their rationales often echo that of George Mallory’s famous quip about why he wanted to climb Mount Everest: “Because it’s there.”
“The bottom line is, I find it fun,” said Michael Gibbons, founder of Brea-based private equity firm Fairmont Capital Inc.
Gibbons, unlike Mallory, successfully scaled the world’s highest mountain and lived to tell about it.
Shared Interests, Goals
And then there are the business metaphors.
“Climbers have some of the traits that are important for a job like the one we do,” Struppa said.
“First of all, the ability to work in a team, because when you’re on a mountain … my success and my ability to stay alive depends on your ability to stay alive.
“So you really learn how to depend on your team and how to share responsibilities, [and] how to help each other when somebody is in trouble. Those are very important qualities that people in normal life don’t learn, because you never need that.”
Another quality mountaineers share is the ability to “delay gratification, and to have a plan for [the] long run,” Struppa said.
“When climbing a big mountain, you prepare for six or eight months,” he said. “I like to eat, and for six or eight months I would be careful about everything. My body became really tuned for the mountain, and that’s something which in my job here is very important—because when I’m presenting to the board in a couple of months the plan for the future, it’s something that is not about Chapman next year, but Chapman that we want to have in 2029.”
Climbing big mountains also means that one “can take pain and discomfort—the weather is horrifying, it’s incredibly cold, and then it’s incredibly hot,” Struppa said. “And then the food, what kind of food can you have at 20,000 feet? And then you can’t shower for three weeks.”
“So I think that the reason why Jim and I connected so well is not simply because we can talk about mountains together, but because he recognized in me [the traits that] were important in an academic leader.”
Perseverance
David Pyott would likely agree about the leadership traits that climbing instills.
A hike in the Scottish Highlands with friends from church camp evolved into a lifelong passion for the former Allergan chief executive, who’s since ascended several notable peaks, including Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Mount Elbert in Colorado, La Meije in the French Alps, Clariden in Switzerland, and Mount Kinabalu in Malaysia.
Mountaineering taught him “a lot about perseverance [and] survival in bad weather conditions,” and was “good preparation for being a CEO for 17 years,” said Pyott, who transformed Allergan into a global pharmaceutical company with more than $7 billion in sales before his 2016 departure.
The lessons in perseverance and managing tough conditions paid clear dividends in 2014. Allergan, under Pyott’s direction, spent much of the year fighting Canada-based Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc. and activist investor Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management LP in their attempt to buy out the Irvine-based drugmaker.
The battle—widely seen by Wall Street as a fait accompli once Valeant and Ackman announced their intentions—lasted nearly seven months and featured scabrous attacks between the parties before ending in November of that year when New Jersey-based Actavis PLC made an offer for Allergan valued at $72.5 billion.
Everest Beckons
Pyott’s next challenge? Aside from serving on the boards of several pharma-related companies, he’s preparing to reach Mount Everest’s base camp—elevation 17,000 feet—by 2020. He doesn’t plan to ascend to the summit, however.
His daily routine includes a “daily swim and mountain biking in Orange County. Obviously, [the] only way to prep for altitude is frequent ascents of Mount Baldy.”
Fairmont Capital’s Gibbons summited Everest in 2011. Last January he completed the last leg of Explorers Grand Slam, whereby climbers reach the tops of the highest mountain on every continent—the Seven Summits—and also cross-country ski to the North and South Poles.
“I enjoy putting together the teams, the planning, the thinking about the equipment—you can’t carry the kitchen sink with you, so you need to narrow it down to what you really need, [and] how you’re going to use things,” Gibbons said.
“You do that quite often in business. If you’re in a company that wants to build a brand-new plant in Mexico or in China or in Los Angeles, [you’ll need to] know what type of team do you want to put together, what resources do you have, what are the risks, is your company going to survive this transition of building a new factory?
“So in many ways, it’s the same skill set. It’s just put in an extreme condition, because when you actually get to some place like Nepal or Antarctica, and they drop you off by helicopter or plane, you’re on your own,” Gibbons said. “There’s no dropping by the CVS because you forgot to buy some aspirin.”
He’s one of only about 60 people who’ve completed Explorers Grand Slam and said he looks forward to revisiting Kilimanjaro in about 15 months, with his entire family in tow this time.
“Our [three] kids all went to climb Mount Whitney here in the Sierras with me when they turned 12,” he said. “Then when they turned 16, we went to climb Kilimanjaro. Now that [my sons are] getting married, and [my daughter has] a long-term boyfriend, I get to take [the extended family] on the same adventure.”
Gibbons’ firm, founded in 1985, initially invested in mergers and acquisitions ranging from $5 million to $300 million. Now he said it’s focused on “venture capital investing in early startups” and works hand in hand with a few of the groups based in and around the University of California-Irvine, including Tech Coast Angels.
Dropping everything to join a team on its way to Denali or Russia is tempting but not always an option.
“You rarely can just jump on one of those expeditions because you’ve got business and family issues, but you put it on your list of to-dos, and you continue training and learning,” Gibbons said.
Learning the Ropes
Chapman’s Struppa, a mathematician by trade, took interest in mountain climbing “in the way in which professors get involved—through reading a book.”
A friend recommended “Into Thin Air” by Jon Krakauer, and Struppa finished it in three hours.
It focuses on the 1996 death of eight climbers on Mount Everest. Rather than dissuade climbs, the best-selling book is credited with providing a boost in interest in the world’s best-known ascent. Struppa was no different.
“The book was so powerful that I decided I wanted to go on those mountains.”
He contacted one of the expedition companies mentioned in the book, Mountain Madness.
“They said, ‘Tell us a little bit about yourself, how many miles you run every day,’ and I said, ‘Why, I don’t run any miles.’” Questions about climbing experience and winter camping elicited similar responses.
The agency declined his request but gave him an exercise plan, which he followed as prescribed. About six months later, he was in shape and ready to start learning how to climb.
“I have to say it transformed me, because I’ve never been a super-athletic guy. But for those years that I was into the climbing, essentially until I came here in 2006, I was really super-fit and super-strong.”
Mountaineering “was a great break from my work because, at the time I was the dean of arts and sciences at George Mason University in Virginia, and there was a lot of pressure—[it] was not necessarily very pleasant work,” Struppa said.
Aside from Aconcagua, he’s been to Kilimanjaro, the Italian Alps, and Mount Elbrus in Russia.
Next on his list is a return to the Himalayas’ 26,864-foot Cho Oyu, the sixth-highest mountain in the world. He first attempted the climb in 2002.
“We never made it to the top that year because the weather was awful.”
John Hueston, partner at Newport Beach-based law firm Hueston Hennigan LLP, was in a similar situation shortly after taking up mountain climbing.
“I committed with my best friend to climb Mount McKinley,” he said. “We trained for the whole of my second year in law school. I actually hiked the steps in Yale’s Payne Whitney gym every day with a 50-pound backpack on. And by that spring, I was in the right kind of shape to do a three and a half week expedition on Mount McKinley.
“We got up some 19,000 feet and were blown back by a blizzard, and we turned back. You have to have tenacity but also really good judgment. Really good mountaineers will tell you that the best know when to turn around.
“The accidents that often happen [are when] people who stubbornly go that extra 200 yards to the summit when it’s past the turnaround point, and then they get stuck. And then the tragedy happens.”
Climber’s High
The prolonged absences required to summit some of the highest peaks didn’t fit well with Hueston’s trial schedule, so he’s turned to running and cycling to keep in optimal shape.
Recently he cycled across the country, usually early in the morning, taking breaks for phone calls and client issues, and averaging about 120 miles a day.
It worked out because he planned it three years in advance, and scheduled trials around the month he’d be gone.
“That was my greatest logistical achievement,” Hueston joked, adding that the experience also provides a break from the routine.
“People say when I’m in the shower, I have some of my best ideas,” he said. “I think people who really take exercising seriously will have those breakthrough moments intellectually while they’re on a run or on their bike or engaged in sport, because it kind of changes the paradigm a bit and has you think differently.”
Like Meditation
Ehsan Gharatappeh, founder and chief executive of CellPoint Corp. in Newport Beach, compares mountaineering to meditation―you have to be present in the moment “because you’re using all your physical energy to hang to the wall and to go up. You don’t have time to think about anything else. You can’t think about the past or the future.
“We all, myself included, fall in the trap of go, go, go,” he said. “But at the end of the day, that is not what creates the tremendous amount of value in business. I slow myself through hiking, climbing and meditation. I’m focused on nothing but what I’m doing. And then I’ll walk out of that, I’m like, oh, there’s the answer to that thing that was bothering me.”
Gharatappeh, whose company refurbishes cellphone parts at factories in China and Denver, plans to take his children, ages 8 and 9, to California’s highest mountain, Mount Whitney, next summer.
When asked how he got into mountaineering, he said that “around 10 years ago … I read this book called ‘Into Thin Air.’”
He was also inspired by Ed Viesturs, “a hard-core mountaineer” who summited all 14 mountain peaks over 26,000 feet without supplemental oxygen.
“One of the quotes in his book that always sticks with me is [when he said] ‘I’ve got two daughters, and people asked me was it worth it? What if something would have happened to you while you’re on the top of one of these eight-thousand-meter peaks, would it have been worth it?’”
“His response: ‘I don’t know if it would be worth it or not, but I do know that some people live a life that all they can say about that life is that they lived the life to enable them to get old and gray. That’s not for me.’”
“I’m not suggesting that I’m on that level as him, but there’s a piece of that that I can identify with.”
