Recently, Nepal’s Mount Everest made international headlines [2] when several climbers descending from the summit died from various causes. Obviously, successful expeditions draw less attention than unsuccessful ones, but it’s still worth noting that, just a few days earlier, five Chileans under the leadership of Rodrigo Jordán reached the world’s highest summit and descended successfully [3]. This was the fifth Chilean expedition to stand atop the world’s highest summit; 20 years ago, Jordán headed the first.
I met Jordán, who has a PhD from Oxford, on an expedition cruise with the Chilean operator Antarctica XXI [4] in 2004. Over the course of a week sailing the waters of the South Shetland Islands [5] and the Antarctic Peninsula [6], with plenty of time to chat between landings, I learned about his consulting company Vertical [7], and about their leadership courses for the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School [8].
Startlingly, to me at least, Jordán told me that Vertical took urbane business students from around the world for a week trekking and snowshoeing on King George Island [9] – although its airfield makes it the gateway to the area, ice and snow cover 90 percent of the island. As a Wharton official told me, “Instead of being in a hot and safe classroom, the student has to make decisions under harsh conditions, and ambiguous and constantly changing situations.”
Of course, Vertical does team-building courses in less extreme environments that appeal to businesses such as banks and mining companies. While researching an article on the company for Latin Trade [10] magazine, I found out that Jordán was also a philanthropist whose non-profit Fundación Vertical [11] does many of the same things for underprivileged children, focusing on outdoor education. It’s worth noting that he earned his Oxford doctorate with a thesis on innovation and urban poverty and, while teaching at Santiago’s Universidad Católica [12], he’s also president of the Fundación Nacional para la Superación de la Pobreza [13] (Foundation to Overcome Poverty).
Despite the magnitude of his achievements, I found Jordán to be a modest individual unconcerned with bragging about his recreational, commercial, intellectual and philanthropic activities; in reality, he appears to have managed an admirable balance among them. Still, in a country that lacks a strong philanthropic tradition, with huge disparities between haves and have-nots, his stature among Chileans – if not quite equal to that of Everest
among the world’s great summits - deserves greater recognition. Chilean defense minister Andrés Allamand’s recent statement that “Jordán has become without a doubt one of the greatest sportsmen in Chile [14]” tells just a fraction of the story.
Links:
[1] http://www.moon.com/files/blog-entry-images/Rodrigo Jordán.jpg
[2] http://www.smh.com.au/world/everest-death-zone-claims-four-lives-in-a-day-20120522-1z35q.html
[3] http://www.santiagotimes.cl/sports/other/23829-chilean-expedition-conquers-mount-everest
[4] http://antarcticaxxi.com/
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Shetland_Islands
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Peninsula
[7] http://www.vertical.cl/home/index.php?Lang=en
[8] http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/
[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_George_Island_(South_Shetland_Islands)
[10] http://latintrade.com/
[11] http://www.fundacionvertical.cl/
[12] http://www.uc.cl/
[13] http://www.fundacionpobreza.cl/
[14] http://www.moon.com/books/moon-handbooks/moon-chile-third-edition