Chile's Climbing Philanthropist

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.