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Wharton Business School has a program called Leadership Ventures which consist of a series of challenges such as trekking in Antarctica, high altitude multisport in Atacama Desert in Chile, mountaineering on Mount Cotopaxi in Ecuador and tall ship sailing in the South Pacific.. The vision of the program is to develop leaders who excel in stressful and ambiguous environments. The program is designed to put students under a lot of pressure in highly challenging situations where much depends on teamwork and leadership. One of its implicit goals is to enable students to experience failure.
Preston B. Cline, senior associate director of Wharton’s Leadership Ventures, explains: “Cutting-age companies which have adopted a team-based approach have proved to be the most successful and are believed to be the paradigms of the future. The business community is proving to be very dynamic and our graduates are required to be team oriented, quickly adaptive to changes in the business climate, and highly resilient when plans go awry. One of the unique things about some of the Wharton students is that they have faced a lot of academic success and so are, therefore, less equipped at recovering from failure. So to counteract those life experiences, opportunities for failure are built into the programs.”
Active combat is one of the most stressful and hostile environments imaginable and much research has been done in academia (including the Wharton school) on applicability of military leadership and decision making methods in the civilian / business world. Ten years ago, Wharton Leadership Ventures added a trek hosted by OCS (Officer Candidate School) at the Marine Corps HQ base Quantico. Enlisted men and women go through their training either at Camp Pendleton in Southern California or at Parris Island in South Carolina. All officer recruits go through their training through OCS at Quantico.
Every year about 300 Wharton Students enter a lottery and about a 100 of them get a chance to spend 24 hours at Quantico and for many of them this one day may be one of the most trying days they have faced.
Every year about 300 Wharton Students enter a lottery and about a 100 of them get a chance to spend 24 hours at Quantico and for many of them this one day may be one of the most trying days they have faced.
They get to experience hands-on leadership and decision-making marine style. Some of the key concepts include Marine Corps Leadership Traits, 70% decision making (if you have 70% of the information, have done 70% of the analysis, and feel 70% confident, then move. A less than ideal action, swiftly executed, stands a chance of success. If you have less information, your chance of success is too low, if you have more – you may have waited too long), and action-based decision making (Act-Learn-Adjust. Action gives you more information. Nothing is learned from inaction.)
That's me being "drilled"
A big part of the impact of the program is the element of surprise and that you can’t prepare for it, so we have been asked not to give too many details. I will oblige, but I will say that this was a very intense, difficult and in some ways eye-opening experience. If you enjoy stretching and testing yourself, going outside of your comfort zone and exposing yourself to new things, and if you ever get an opportunity – you should take it. Chances are you’ll like the experience as much as I did.
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