What today’s business leaders can learn from the 1953 Mt. Everest conquest

Next month marks the 65th anniversary of Sir Edmund Hillary’s ascent to the summit of Mt. Everest.  It was an inspiring first that captured the world’s imagination. But, it is the back story of Hillary’s ascent that carries a message I find particularly relevant for business leaders today.

It helps to understand the scope of the challenge. Located in the Himalayas about 650 miles from where I grew up in India, Mt. Everest towers more than five miles upward into the jet stream. To put that into perspective, consider New York’s Freedom Tower, the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. Even if you stacked 16 Freedom Towers on top of each other, you’d still be more than 600 hundred feet lower than Mt. Everest’s snow-capped summit.

Scaling the mountain is an exercise in the extreme. It’s frigid—an average temperature of -33 degrees Fahrenheit in January and a few degrees less than zero in July. It’s gusty—winds of up to 177 miles per hour have been recorded there, equivalent to those of a severe tornado. Furthermore, using ice axes to pull yourself foot by foot to the top is both grueling and dangerous—especially since the rarefied air at that altitude contains only one-third of the oxygen found at sea level.

Yet Mt. Everest yielded to Hillary for reasons far more significant than his climbing skill and determination. Hillary made two crucial decisions:

• First, he teamed with an experienced high-altitude mountaineer from Nepal named Tenzing Norgay.
• Second, he joined an expedition headed by former British military officer John Hunt that included 362 porters, 20 Sherpa guides, and 10,000 pounds of supplies.

With a strong network of support and a dedicated expert by his side, Hillary achieved what no one had before.

The corollary for business leaders facing the challenge of the 4th Industrial Revolution?

Strategic alliances and ecosystems can help individuals and organizations accomplish what they cannot achieve on their own.

It’s a message that businesses would be wise to take to heart. At Deloitte, we’ve come to recognize that to help clients and communities climb their respective Mt. Everests we must prepare like Sir Hillary – with secure supports in place and complementing experts by our side.

It’s about being a force multiplier. We know our competitive advantages—deep industry experience, a wide range of services, global capabilities, and a collaborative culture. And we have the size and scope (our portfolio serves 80 percent of the Fortune 500), coupled with the global reach (clients in more than 150 countries) to establish broad networks of close working relationships. This positions Deloitte well to gather together exceptional minds across industries and turn complex business issues into opportunities for measurable impact for clients and society.

Let me share a few examples. Deloitte has collaborated with SAP and Apple to help businesses become more efficient, productive, and mobile. More recently, we established alliances with Facebook to help companies fully evolve into digital businesses; with Amazon Web Services to accelerate client digital innovation and migration of core business applications and processes to the cloud; and with HP to accelerate the manufacturing industry’s digital transformation. By bringing together the very best of Deloitte with the very best of organizations who are leaders in their own right, we can leverage strengths to make an impact that matters.

We also convene players of all sizes to develop highly specialized ecosystems. Consider Deloitte Catalyst which enables us to introduce clients to niche companies so they can jointly develop specialized technology solutions. Or, at a more micro level, Deloitte Pixel, which breaks down client problems into “pixels,” or their component parts, and then uses crowdsourcing to generate novel ideas that address each part. Deloitte also entered an XPRIZE competition to take on and defeat one of life’s most relentless scourges—cancer—and have enlisted collaborators across the cancer-fighting ecosystem.

Complex times demand such far-reaching teamwork. On the brink of the Fourth Industrial Revolution—with the very nature of work being transformed by artificial intelligence, robotics, big data, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, energy storage, and much more—strategic alliances and ecosystems have never been more critical to business and societal success. Perhaps, instead of considering buy-or-build strategies, more business leaders should be asking themselves, “Buy, build—or buddy-up?”

With alliances and ecosystems, it’s how you put them together that will set you apart. That was certainly the case for Hillary. In fact, without Norgay, Hillary may have never reached the top—or lived to tell about it. Before he and his Sherpa guide made their final ascent, Hillary stepped on a chunk of ice. It broke away, sending Hillary hurtling downward toward the bottom of a deep crevasse. Norgay instinctively tightened his rope and prevented Hillary from crashing into a rock formation many feet below.

Remember, you don’t need to face your most daunting challenges alone. Strategic alliances and ecosystems can take you to new heights, just as they did for Hillary in one of history’s iconic moments of peak performance.

Originally published April 11, 2018 on Forbes.com.