The Maine Event. Lessons in Business Leadership from the Trail.

Death by lightning or death by bear? I carefully weigh my options, knowing full well, this is not my finest hiking moment.

I’m crouched in the mouth of a small cave, somewhat concerned that a bear might live here. In front of me is a curtain of rain and the booming violence of thunder as a sudden summer storm unleashes its worst on this remote Maine mountain top. Behind me, my backpack is blocking the tunnel that leads further into the darkness. It’s my lame attempt to buy a few seconds should a beast actually live in there.

The fully developed storm appeared over the ridge of the mountain exactly as I was on the final difficult climb to the summit. As happens during the summer, the morning forecast gave no warning except for the ‘scattered storms’ obligatory note. I’d had no cell service to that point, but I had now climbed high enough that just as the storm appeared I got signal. My phone beeped urgently at me. ‘Find Shelter Immediately’ warned my weather app. “No kidding,” I thought, as the rain moved in, and the first bolts of lightning cracked down.

This is how I found myself hiding in the damp, confined, bear cave.

As the Appalachian Trail winds its way north-eastwards through western Maine, it does not give up the miles easily. In return for enduring challenging terrain, big climbs, hordes of black flies, difficult river crossings, and moose poop, it gifts me extraordinary wilderness views the likes of which I have not seen in all my hiking.

The Trail is so far north, at this point, that the summer days are long. It starts to get light around 4.30 a.m. and is still light past 9 p.m. This allows for long hiking days, which is just as well as the tough terrain makes for slow going.

But, by now, you know I love a challenge. So, if you would like to find out how I survived the bear cave, how I managed to hike across this part of western Maine, and the leadership lessons it taught me, read on.?

Me vs. Carnivorous Plants

Feed Me.

As the shuttle driver pulled away from the trail-head, he shouted out the window at me, “Oh, make sure to look out for the carnivorous plants.” Then he was gone.

I stared at the dust rising from his tires as he disappeared down the remote logging road, trying to reconcile his statement with what I knew about the dangers of hiking in Maine. Bear, Moose, Wolf, Lynx, and Cougar are on the dangerous list. Black flies are on the super annoying list. I did not have a list for plants that want to eat me.

While I spent a solid few hours trudging up the next mountain, lost in thought about this particular peril, it turns out that I didn’t need to worry so much. The Purple Pitcherplant (Sarracenia Purpurpea) is carnivorous, but thankfully grows to be only about a foot tall at the most. I found some beautiful specimens in the bogs that are a regular feature of this part of Maine, often located further up the mountain that you might expect. It’s exactly because the Pitcherplant grows in these wetlands that it has evolved to catch insects. Typically, plants pull nutrients from the soil, but in these wetlands that’s not an option, hence the carnivorous approach.

The pitcher shaped leaves collect rainwater and the bristles inside face downwards, which make it exceedingly difficult for an insect to get out once it has gone in. After struggling, the insect will meet its doom when it falls into the water at the base of the pitcher and becomes part of the circle of life.

As leaders, we must remember there is always someone out there intent on ruining your day. New businesses and new business models are evolving all the time with the express purpose of taking your market share away from you. In my profession, cyber security, bad actors are everywhere. They want to steal your data or shake you down for bitcoin after a ransomware attack. And, as we all just learnt last week with the Crowdstrike situation, even unintentinal actions can end up having catastrophic consequences on our businesses.

The business equivalent of carnivorous plants surround us.

It’s imperative on us as leaders that we never allow ourselves, or our teams, to become complacent to this reality. Understanding what competition and risks we face, what new threats might be emerging, and how to shift out of harms way is an important part of leadership.

Crossing the River

No Bridge too Far.

I’ve waded across a few small streams during my Appalachian Trail adventures, but Maine elevates the game. Rivers, streams, brooks, and ponds which all need to be crossed, or forded, without the aid of a bridge. There are over twenty crossings on the Trail in Maine that are more than thirty feet wide. The water levels on this section ranged from rock-hopping to waist-deep, and consequently my feet were wet for hours at a time.

As you might image the water levels are highly dependent on recent rain fall and on accumulated rain totals. Some crossings were challenging, but thankfully none felt overly dangerous or required me to find an alternative path. In 2023, there was so much rain that many of the river crossings became too dangerous, forcing hikers to find alternative routes around them.

At the small town of Caratunk the crossing is always considered dangerous, because of water releases from an upstream hydroelectric dam. The Appalachian Trail Conservatory came up with a unique solution. Here, during hiking season, a crossing service is provided with a guide who ferries hikers and their backpacks across the river in a canoe. A blue blaze is painted on the canoe, making it an official part of the Appalachian Trail.

River crossings can be dangerous no matter how deep the water is. Much of this has to do with the physics of water. According to a highly informative article on the Pacific Crest Trails Associations website: “Water weighs 62.4 pounds per cubic foot, and the pressure exerted by moving water increases with the square of its velocity.” I went down a bit of a rabbit hole trying to validate that, but sadly, my math skills just weren’t up to it.

The point is that it’s easy to lose your footing and have the weight of the water push you down into the stream or river. Combine the weight of the water with the weight of your backpack and it’s a recipe for disaster.

A few golden rules exist for crossing. Firstly, face the water and lean into the flow. This prevents the force of the water from pushing you over if you slip on a rock. Secondly, ensure that you have a grounded position with two firm foot placements and your hiking poles before taking another step. If you have other hikers with you, then techniques such as crossing as a triangle or in a wedge can help reduce the risk, especially for the weakest hikers. Finally unclip the straps of your backpack. In this way if you do end up underwater you should be able to wriggle free from your pack and surface.

There are some far too obvious lessons here for what it means to be a leader.

The first might just be about knowing what to do in a given situation and preparing for it. Everyone knows that eventually we might find ourselves in a situation where the economy downturns, or an unsavory incident happens in the workplace, or we are breached in a cyber-attack. But do we take the time to educate ourselves on what to do in those situations ahead of time?

Leaning into the problem is also another great leadership lesson. If you turn your back on a problem, as if ignoring it will make it go away, you are far more likely to suffer the consequences. Leaning into a problem, inspecting it, understanding what is happening and then using what you have to your advantage to counter it is great leadership.

Finally, the power of working as a team can reduce the risk for everyone as long as you know how to do it.

Applying these insights from a leadership perspective might just get you, and your colleagues, safely to the other side of any river you choose to cross.

From Here to There

You can’t get there, from here.

It’s not only the Trail that is hard in Maine. The logistics of getting on and off the Trail are harder in Maine too. Trying to plan my sections, hiking days, resupply, and zero day all proved to be complex and something I had to rework as soon as I got up there.

I first heard this quintessential Maine saying from a shuttle driver I had called about a ride to a trail-head, “You can’t get there, from here,” he said. It’s a great saying and one which is used to express how difficult it can be to drive to places that are deceptively close as the crow flies.

I experienced this firsthand when even a short 35-mile section of the trail would equate to double that distance by car to get from one trail-head to the other. Lakes, rivers, mountains, and a lack of roads all conspiring against me to chew up time and money.

From a leadership perspective, this phrase holds a lot of power. We must be able to look at situations and know if we can “get there, from here.” If ‘there’ turns out to be an impossible task, then that is a point where a leader must coalesce everyone around a plan to do something different.

I’ve seen this play out in our research to cure cystic fibrosis. The extraordinary new medicines my daughter’s take, small-molecules, have been a miracle for most of those fighting this disease. However, for the 10% that these drugs don’t work for, there is no incremental improvement or next-gen version that will fix the problem. It’s impossible to get there from here.

That’s why the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation launched a $500M program called ‘Path to a Cure’, which is driving research in cutting-edge bio-tech like gene-editing and gene-transfer. The CFF knew we couldn’t get “there from here” so the leaders formulated a new plan that can find a path forward that is achievable.

The conversation about not being able to get there from here is undoubtably one of those hard conversations. It brings pride of ownership, fear of change, and of uncertainly, right to the forefront. However, as leaders, it is our job to recognize these situations and do the hard things. To have the hard conversations. If we do these things then we can forge a path to there.

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Zero Days

A body at rest.

After five straight days of tough hiking, it was time for a zero day. A zero day is one where you hike zero miles, usually staying at a hostel, or at a budget motel in a trail-town. If you only hike a few miles in a day, that is called a near zero day, or a Nero.

Frequency of zero days varies depending on hiking speed, funds available for accommodation, weather, and the tramily someone is hiking with. On average, thru-hikers probably take a zero-day every ten days. However, section hikers like me tend to need more frequent zero days as our legs aren’t in the same condition as thru-hikers.

The primary purpose of zero days is to give the body a chance to rest and repair itself. An insane desire to eat anything and everything that you can find usually accompanies these days. A whole large pizza? Bring it on. This is the fuel the body needs to activate and support the healing.

A fascinating blog by the health tracker company Whoop titled ‘Why You Still Need a Rest Day, Even When You Are Feeling Good’, explores the science behind rest days. It discusses the significant impact that over-training can have on endocrine levels. For example, they show how missing rest days can lead to an excess of the hormone cortisol, or a decline in testosterone in men.

They discuss how most injuries start well before we even notice them. Athletes who added downtime, often without even perceiving injuries, experienced a significant improvement in running economy which is the amount of oxygen a body needs to run at certain speeds. Using a large data set from their users, Whoop concludes that taking rest days is a critical part of being a high performing athlete.

It’s probably obvious the parallel I’m going to draw to leadership here. We need to make sure that we build rest time into schedules and those of our teams. In the long term, this will make better everyone a better ‘athlete’.

What rest looks like for you and your colleagues will vary greatly depending on the variables in your environment, just as it does for hikers. It could be short hours on Fridays before the busy season starts, or as simple as taking everyone out to lunch. Ensuring that health and wellness training is available to everyone also goes a long way to helping us understand the power of rest as a way to improve our performance both in and outside of the workplace.

Three Days

Rest the mind.

I’ve always found the first few days back on Trail to be tough hiking days. It’s not just the physical nature of the Trail, but the combination of that with what is going on inside my head. Usually I’m carrying a lot of ‘noise’ up there that takes a few days to settle down. I’m hiking along thinking about that report that I didn’t finish, or the important call I’m going to be missing, or something in my personal life that I am going to need to get to as soon as I get off-trail. Noise.

However, by day three, I’ve always found that this noise dissipates. My surroundings seem to become crisper, and my thoughts are more even and measured. They have quietened. The topics I tend to think about are either simple, like when will I stop to eat, or deeper and far more expansive than normal. For those bigger thoughts, it’s as if I have better control of the process and can sift through ideas that had never even occurred previously.

An REI Blog, ‘The Nature Fix: The Three Day Effect’ confirms my suspicions that this isn’t just me making this up, it’s an actual thing. The blog draws on research from scientists who were studying Attention Restoration Theory (ART). ART theory proposes restoration of higher function prefrontal cortex-mediated executive processes through exposure to nature. These are process such as selective attention, problem solving, inhibition, and multi-tasking.

With an experiment designed using wilderness backpackers, they showed that these unplugged hikers achieved a nearly 50% improvement in creative thinking and insight problem solving. Further research showed that this effect was only in people who genuinely unplugged. Taking a vacation where you are on your phone all the time, or binge-watching the latest must-see show in your hotel room, isn’t going to help your creativity.

The blog concludes that when you put yourself in an environment that minimizes attention disruption and multi-tasking, your sensory perception, empathy and productive day-dreaming step in to use those processing cycles.

As leaders, we need to set the example for how to take vacation time and we must learn how to do that properly ourselves. I’m fortunate to work for a firm that actively encourages everyone to disconnect when they take vacation time. If you struggle to remember your password when you get back, that’s probably a good sign that you have had strong restorative time.

I also think the need to decouple ourselves from technology is critical if you are looking for true rest and relaxation. Sitting on the beach doom-scrolling isn’t going to give your brain the chance it needs to reset. Instead, read a book or just stare out at the waves.

Imagine coming back from a long weekend after having fully unplugged and having a 50% increase in your problem solving and creativity. That would be worth every penny of the time you just took off.

Four Years

Olympiad.

As I was preparing for this section of the Trail, every news channel was ramping up it’s coverage of the upcoming Olympic Games to be held in Paris. It’s the 33rd Olympiad of the modern period and the 700th since the Greeks got bored and decided some friendly competition between the City States would be an excellent day out.

In ancient Greece, the word Olympiad was used as a measure of time - four years. Specifically, the Olympiad was the period between the games. The reason why the games were every four years is lost in antiquity, but today all major global sporting events from the Olympics to the World Cup take place on a four-year cycle.

I spent a good deal of my time on this section thinking about my journey along the whole Appalachian Trail, as this fourth year of my plan will see me hike my final section and complete the full length of the Trail. At some point I got to wondering if four years spent doing something might carry a certain human significance.

High school is four years, as is college. From the Middle-Ages up to today apprenticeships also take around four years. A military active duty enlistment term is commonly four-years.

As I hiked through the dense forest of western Maine, I pondered if four years is the amount of time it takes for someone to go from immature to mature in all these endeavors. If you have the natural talent then four-years training in a sport could get you into the Olympics. Four years in high school takes you through the cycle of ‘no clue, think you know, actually do know, got it and ready to do something else.’

This is perhaps the same cycle I have gone through over these last four years with my hiking. I look back at my early days and realize how much I had to learn, but now with just one more major section hike later this year, I am ready to stand at the top of Mt. Katahdin and be done.

We live in a world that is accelerating and one where we normalize instant gratification. When Amazon doesn’t deliver that essential to you the same day, it’s a disaster. The pace of technology change is running faster than we can, and artificial intelligence is only increasing that pace. But our ability to learn, mature and become competent in our chosen domains does not accelerate at the same speed. Certainly, tools can help us learn faster, access to ubiquitous information can help us become more knowledgeable, but nothing replaces experience.

Impatience might be one of the biggest aspects of the workplace that leaders have to contend with today. Not all impatience is unwarranted. There are times when you or your colleagues should be impatient. If your business is moving too slowly to adapt to changes, then it makes sense that team members might feel slowed down and become impatient.

What doesn’t change though is real experience. You can’t have that unless you’ve failed. Unless you sat in that meeting or had to solve the hard problem. You can’t have that if you haven’t built your network and learnt from people who have been there and done that. You can’t have that if you try to shorten the time between promotions or pay raises. Some things just take time.

Impatience is easy. We are all good at that. Leadership, though, is about finding that right balance between patience and impatience and helping colleagues understand when, why and how to apply patience.

In an informative Harvard Business Review article, ‘Becoming a More Patient Leader.’ The benefits of a patient leader were reflected in a 13% increase in productivity and 16% for creativity and collaboration versus a leader who was not considered patient. That’s a significant impact on a business if you can find that right balance.

I’d like to think that I’ve become more patient as I’ve aged. It’s something that I still need to work on, but I do try to be more intentful about my responses when things aren’t going exactly how I would like them to go. Finding that balance comes down to really understanding the impact of being impatient versus patient.

There were times when I was dealing with my daughter’s issues related to Cystic Fibrosis that I was impatient with good reason, and almost certainly times when I was impatient in situations where a little patience would have served my daughters better. I am grateful to all the people who were patient with me in those situations.

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The remote wilderness of western Maine is humbling in its scale. The small towns that dot the landscape are few and far between, but as always, the people I met both on the Trail and in the small towns were warm and welcoming.

Remember how I was hiding in the bear cave? Well, thankfully, if there was a beast in there, it chose not to come out. I patiently waited for the storm to pass, gathered my belongings, gathered myself, and scrambled up to the top of the mountain keeping one eye over my shoulder. With the storm dissipated the view from on top was exceptional.

Sometimes patience really does pay dividends.

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If you would like more information on why I hike, please visit the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (CFF) at www.cff.org.

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If you feel inspired enough to make a donation to the CFF, you can do so at the following link, and know that your donation will make a significant difference: DONATE

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