Climbing Out The Canyon
Posted By Rob Millard - 0 Comments -
A couple of weeks ago I found myself in Phoenix AZ and got to strike one of the things off my "gotta do before I die" list. I arrived in Phoenix two days beforehand, hired a car (was meant to be a Harley but the folk at Blue Sky Motorcycle Rentals said that there was snow on the ground and icy conditions north of Flagstaff so I wimped out) and headed for the Grand Canyon. I had booked a place at the Indian Garden campsite on the Bright Angel Trail. The plan was to arrive mid-afternoon Saturday; hire the necessary gear; hike to the campsite (half way down) and on Sunday complete the trail to the Colorado River and stroll sedately back to the south rim.
Cut to chase: Flight delayed in Pittsburgh, arrived too late on Saturday; had to do whole hike from rim to river to rim on Sunday despite notices (View image) warning of the possibility of death.
I started out from the trailhead in the freezing dawn with the mercury at 19 degrees F / -7 degrees C. My knees took a solid knocking (I'm a few days short of 45 and spend far more time behind a desk than on horseback or on my own back legs with a rifle over my shoulder, than I did when I was 25.) Nevertheless, I reached the river in just over 3 hours. That was the easy bit. Horizontally, the hike in and out is 25 km (15.6 miles.) But over that distance you first drop and then have to climb 1.3 km (0.8 miles.) Each way.
08h50 - The Colorado River
It was one of the more strenuous things that I have done in the last decade. The climb back out took over five hours, steadily putting one foot in front of the other, one step at a time. I must have begun to hallucinate :-) because I found myself thinking about one of my clients (a law firm) that is in early merger discussions. Mergers, it occurred to me, bear some striking similarities to a hike like this. The trail down is the easy bit. The initial flirtations; the due diligence; developing the joint strategy; the negotiations; the mounting excitement as the obstacles are cleared. The deal is struck, as it were, right next to the Colorado River and everyone thinks that is that. It isn't, of course. The climb back out is like post merger integration. It is DIFFICULT.
When the going gets tough, the likelihood of success is directly related to the degree to which there are options. Had there been a helicopter parked next to the trail two thirds of the way back up, just before the really steep final climb, I would have been prepared to pay a fairly substantial amount of money for a seat on it. I'd even have been able to convincingly justify the decision in all sorts of ways, saying that the chopper ride was much more valuable to me than finishing the trail so it wasn't in any way a failure. But, of course, it would have been.
Focusing on the rewards ahead and burning bridges behind are an important part of the process of making change (any change) "stick." All too often, an initiative fails not because it is too difficult, or not worthwhile, but because it is too easy to bail out. Many say that mergers fail because of cultural incompatibility. I say that mergers fail because cultural incompatibilities are not proactively managed away during the post-merger integration. I have seen mergers where the cultural differences have been extreme succeed, because the options were removed. Others, less challenging, have failed because they were not.
Beware of "bail out" clauses and other bolt-holes. As Sun Tzu wrote, thousands of years ago, an army fights far better when it has its back to a cliff, than where there is an avenue of escape. Some things are achieved best by simply gritting one's teeth and plodding on, overcoming one obstacle after another, until one reaches the canyon rim.
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