Built to Scale: The Relationship Between Mountains and Strong Teams

Extensive mountaineering experience has taught us that mountains symbolize human strengths and endurance, and pose one of the greatest areas of challenge for any one person and their team. This made choosing the image of a mountain for a logo an easy and natural decision 42 years ago.

And yet mountains are made of many contradictions:

• They present many obstacles and uncertainties, but force us to act with the greatest of convictions.
• They require painstaking preparation, yet present the very face of change moment by moment.
• Mountains stretch human relationships and endurance to the limit, then show us that we need other people to go on.
• They teach us about digging deep to find what our personal strengths are in the face of adversity.
• They teach us that by pooling our strengths that a team can accomplish far more than a group of individuals.

One can climb faster, but more can climb higher!

Mountains also fire the imagination, but their harsh reality burns away any illusion and teaches us who we are. They require us to face the everyday, knowing that it is the obstacle itself that defines us.

And in the final analysis, it is our personal strengths and those of our team that allow us to continue the climb, reach new summits, and enjoy the view before pushing on again.

High forming=mountains;  High performing=your team? You’ll have to take that first step, together, to find out.