On The Edge

Have you ever faced a challenge that pushed you to your limits—physically, mentally, or emotionally—and wondered how to lead through it? In On the Edge, explorer and leadership expert Alison Levine argues that the same principles required to survive in extreme physical environments—like mountaineering and polar expeditions—are the same ones we need to thrive in the unpredictable world of modern business and life. Through gripping adventure stories anchored in real climbs, she shows how resilience, preparation, humility, and teamwork create leaders who can perform under pressure.

Levine contends that leadership is not just for CEOs or expedition captains; it’s everyone’s responsibility. Drawing from her experience as the captain of the first American Women’s Everest Expedition and as a polar explorer who has skied to both Poles, she reveals that success isn’t about being fearless—it’s about how you respond to fear, failure, and chaos. In places where mistakes can literally cost lives, she discovered truths that apply equally to boardrooms, classrooms, and families: agility beats arrogance, empathy matters more than ego, and progress often looks like moving backward.

Scaling Life’s Mountains

The book’s premise is simple but profound: leadership lessons learned at 29,000 feet or on the frozen Antarctic plateau are timeless—and universal. Levine synthesizes brutally honest expedition stories into eleven key leadership principles that challenge traditional thinking. Whether she’s turning back just short of Everest’s summit in 2002, overcoming Raynaud’s disease in sub-zero temperatures, or rallying her team across six hundred miles of polar ice, she demonstrates that adversity is a mirror showing you exactly who you are as a leader.

You’ll encounter lessons like “Complacency Will Kill You,” emphasizing constant vigilance even when things seem calm, and “Go Back, Jack, Do It Again,” which redefines progress as sometimes requiring backward movement. Through each story—including near-death experiences, failed summit bids, and powerful comebacks—Levine emphasizes that leadership boils down to adaptability, communication, and courage.

From Mountains to Management

The connection between altitude and attitude is central to Levine’s thinking. Business teams, like climbing teams, must make decisions amid volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity—a concept she relates to the military acronym VUCA. She draws from her advisory work at West Point’s Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership, bridging the gap between mountaineering and organizational leadership. Her tales of expedition logistics, near-catastrophic storms, and the delicate balance of trust among teammates become metaphors for how leaders should manage limited resources, conflicting goals, and shifting conditions in corporate life.

Why These Lessons Matter

In an era where change is constant and crises are unpredictable, On the Edge speaks directly to anyone who must lead under pressure. Levine’s stories strip leadership to its rawest form—where titles and hierarchies give way to teamwork and human will. Her ultimate message: leadership is about helping others move forward even when the path is steep, uncertain, and painful. It’s about owning your failures as fiercely as your successes and learning to find strength in discomfort. Through her experiences on Everest and beyond, Levine teaches us not just how to climb higher, but how to lead when the air gets thin.

Levine opens with a clear truth: willpower alone won’t save you on a mountain or in business. Preparation—both physical and mental—is what creates the conditions for success. She recounts scaling Mount Shasta repeatedly while working long hours at Goldman Sachs, training at 1:00 a.m. on stair machines, and practicing fatigue, hunger, and sleep deprivation to simulate the challenges of Everest. Her message is that extreme preparation trains both endurance and resilience.

Training the Mind and Body

To lead in volatile environments, you must practice adversity in low-stakes situations. Levine deliberately deprived herself of comfort—limited food, minimal sleep, relentless repetition—to prepare for moments when others might crack. Like military training that conditions soldiers to remain calm under attack, her approach builds a default response to chaos. Preparation, she argues, gives you agility: when you’ve rehearsed every possible setback, even the unexpected won’t shake you.

Learning from Others

Levine emphasizes learning from mentors like Vern Tejas, a legendary Alaskan climber, and observing the disciplined courage of polar explorers like Roald Amundsen, whose careful planning allowed him to reach the South Pole 34 days ahead of his rival Robert Falcon Scott. She warns that Scott’s failures—underprepared teams, unsuitable animals, and poor judgment—show that passion without preparation is reckless. Her takeaway: your willpower matters only if you equip it with skill and foresight.

Empowering Everyone to Lead

Preparation also means empowering others to act when you can’t. On a South Pole expedition, her team rotated leadership daily so each person could navigate and make critical calls. In high-risk contexts, everyone must be capable of leadership. It’s a powerful metaphor for teams in any organization: if you’re the only one trained to make hard decisions, your team is vulnerable. Preparation, then, is not just about mastery—it’s about creating redundancy in strength.

In “Go Back, Jack, Do It Again,” Levine dismantles the myth that progress always means forward motion. Climbers on Everest repeatedly ascend and descend the mountain to acclimatize; they must go down to regain strength before pushing higher. Likewise, in work and life, retreating can be the smartest way to advance. Forcing constant progress without rest or reflection leads to burnout and poor decisions.

The Acclimatization Mindset

Success, Levine argues, depends on understanding adaptation. Going backward isn’t failure—it’s recovery. On Everest, climbers spend weeks adjusting to oxygen scarcity, moving between camps to build red blood cells. The same logic applies to careers or innovation: withdrawal lets you process learning and strengthen your foundation before the next climb. “The body must go down to get stronger,” she writes, “so it can go higher the next time.”

Redefining Progress in Business

Levine connects mountain cycles to organizational strategy. Companies, she warns, often mistake perpetual growth for health. Like climbers ignoring altitude sickness, leaders who never step back to reassess quickly burn out teams and ruin potential. True leaders embrace iterative progress—the willingness to pivot, retreat, or reroute to find safer, smarter ascents. This mirrors modern agile practices in business, where progress emerges from short cycles of testing, reflection, and adjustment.

Taking Courage in Retreat

Retreating is psychologically hard, especially when ambition and ego demand constant upward motion. Levine’s insight is freeing: backward steps don’t erase progress. They are invisible investments in resilience. Every descent builds capability for the next climb—and that’s a lesson worth carrying off the mountain.

When you’re hanging by a rope at 28,000 feet, your life depends on who’s tied to the other end. Levine’s reflections on team selection are a masterclass in recruiting attitude, not just aptitude. For the 2002 American Women’s Everest Expedition, she sought climbers who were both technically skilled and relentlessly team-oriented. But the biggest surprise: she also wanted ego—the right kind.

Performance Ego vs. Arrogance

Inspired by basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski (Coach K), Levine differentiates between arrogance and what she calls “performance ego.” Great teammates, she argues, must believe they can win. They should have the competence and confidence to face uncertainty without hesitation. On the mountain, ego fuels belief in possibility; arrogance, by contrast, puts the team at risk by closing off feedback. The best teams blend humility about the mission with pride in their contribution.

Team Ego and Shared Purpose

The American Women’s Everest team worked because its members possessed strong egos about performance yet were united by “team ego”—a belief that representing the first all-American women’s climb was bigger than any one summit bid. By contrast, on her 2010 expedition with Alpine Ascents, individual climbers pursued personal records and scattered when conditions worsened. The difference shows how shared purpose transforms groups into teams.

Building a Culture of Trust

Levine’s lesson transcends mountaineering: hire for experience, expertise, and ego. You want people who are strong enough to contribute, humble enough to adapt, and proud enough to care about the mission. Team ego—the sense that “we’re in this together”—is what makes people put in the extra mile even when the mountain turns deadly.

In the high-stakes world of mountaineering, who you know can literally mean the difference between life and death. Levine’s chapter “Friends in High Places” reframes networking not as schmoozing, but as survival strategy. On Everest, climbers from different teams rely on one another for information, ropes, and rescue. The same principle applies in organizations: collaboration across boundaries builds resilience.

Relationships Over Rivalry

Levine recalls how teams fix shared ropes and coordinate their summit attempts to avoid deadly overcrowding. She contrasts this spirit of cooperation with tragic stories like that of David Sharp, a climber who died alone on Everest’s slopes in 2006 as others passed by. When people know you personally, she argues, they’re far more inclined to help. Isolation kills; connection saves.

Networking Beyond the Mountain

Her own climb was made possible because of relationships—a friend at Ford Motor Company connected her proposal for the 2002 expedition to the right decision-makers, leading to sponsorship. Just as critically, forging bonds with Sherpas, guides, and rival climbers created a safety net that extended beyond any one team. Her advice: build alliances before you need them, not after disaster strikes.

(Compare this to Adam Grant’s Give and Take, which champions generosity as the foundation of professional success—Levine’s stories add visceral proof from the death zone.)

Reciprocity and Responsibility

Networking, Levine insists, is not transactional—it’s communal. Offering help to others earns trust in environments where trust keeps you alive. Whether in business or mountaineering, the most successful leaders are the ones who invest early in meaningful relationships, creating communities of interdependence rather than competition.

Levine’s 2002 Everest climb ended just 200 feet short of the summit. To outsiders, that sounded like failure. But she insists that coming back alive was the greater victory. Eight years later, she returned to Everest in 2010 and finally reached the top—an ascent powered not by revenge but by experience. The theme of embracing failure runs throughout her book: failure isn’t final; it’s fertile.

Owning Failure

Levine argues you must own your failures, analyze them, and share their lessons. After every expedition, she reviews what worked and what didn’t—just like sports teams watch game tapes. Her analogy: the U.S. Army’s “after action review,” which requires reflection without blame. Whether on the mountain or in the office, failure only becomes useful when you turn it into insight.

Learning through Setbacks

She highlights Chad Kellogg, a brilliant but often unsung mountaineer who attempted Everest speed records without oxygen and failed multiple times. Each attempt taught him something new—about timing, physiology, and humility. Levine celebrates his philosophy: “I have chosen a style of climbing so difficult that I must keep learning.” Failure tolerance, she says, is the true measure of leadership growth.

From Shackleton to Modern Leaders

Levine draws historical parallels to Ernest Shackleton’s doomed Antarctic expedition of 1914. Despite failing to cross the continent, Shackleton’s ability to bring his men home alive defines him as one of history’s greatest leaders. Her takeaway: success is not reaching the summit but returning with your team. In life and leadership, resilience, not perfection, earns respect.

Levine’s mantra, “Fear is fine; complacency will kill you,” comes alive in her chapter on the Khumbu Icefall—the ever-shifting glacier linking Everest Base Camp to higher altitudes. Sherpas, among the world’s best climbers, sometimes skip clipping into safety lines because the terrain feels familiar. Many pay with their lives. Levine uses these tragedies to warn leaders: comfort breeds vulnerability.

The Danger of Overconfidence

Organizations, like mountaineers, falter when they assume past success guarantees future security. Levine compares this mindset to companies like Research in Motion, maker of BlackBerry, which failed to adapt to touchscreen innovation and slid from market dominance to irrelevance. The climber who doesn’t clip in, and the CEO who doesn’t evolve, suffer the same fate: extinction by complacency.

Agility as Survival Skill

In unpredictable terrain, agility trumps strength. Climbers rehearse crossings and rehearse rapid response to shifting ice; corporations must do the same in volatile markets. Agility—both physical and mental—is the closest thing to safety in unstable systems. Levine’s humor and grit shine through her Icefall training stories, even those involving ill-fated carabiners and bruised egos, proving that adaptability begins with humility.

Fear as a Friend

Fear, Levine argues, keeps you alert. Denying it dulls your instincts. Fear tells you to move carefully; complacency tells you to relax when you should stay vigilant. The most dangerous words in leadership are “we’ve always done it this way.” Her advice: stay humble to the mountain, because it is always moving beneath your feet.

Trust isn’t built by title—it’s built by behavior. In “You’re Not Special,” Levine dismantles the hierarchy that separates leaders from teammates. On the mountain, no one gets special treatment; everyone carries weight and risks frostbite. The same spirit applies to leadership anywhere: you earn loyalty not by commanding, but by caring and contributing alongside your people.

Earning Respect Through Empathy

She contrasts toxic climbers—who snap at teammates and shirk duties—with humble leaders who ask questions, learn people’s stories, and adapt their coaching style to fit individuals. Like NBA coach Phil Jackson tailoring his approach to ultra-complex players such as Dennis Rodman, great leaders invest time understanding what motivates and supports each person uniquely. That personal connection turns colleagues into allies.

Leading Side by Side

Levine praises CEOs who “eat last,” borrowing military principles that officers feed their teams before themselves, a practice reflected in Mark Zuckerberg’s open-desk culture and the Undercover Boss experiment. By contrast, she critiques executives like John Thain—who spent $1.2 million redecorating his office amid economic crisis—as examples of disconnect that erode trust.

Being One of the Team

Her insight is simple: if you want people to sacrifice for you, show them you’d do the same for them. Whether climbing Everest or leading a company, “you are not special” means you are not above the climb—you are part of it. Real loyalty comes from shared hardship, not shared slogans.

Sometimes great leadership means breaking the rules. Levine illustrates this through military examples she studied with Brig. Gen. (Ret.) Tom Kolditz at West Point. The story of Pvt. Channing Moss—a soldier impaled with a live rocket-propelled grenade whose medical team ignored regulations to save him—embodies moral courage: when the rules say to wait and watch someone die, great leaders act anyway.

When Protocol Conflicts with Principle

Levine uses Moss’s survival as a metaphor for values-based decision-making. Rules are guides, not chains; when rigid adherence causes harm, leaders must think for themselves. Breaking protocol can be heroic if it preserves life, dignity, or trust. Her warning: organizations that worship procedure over principle—like the Long Island Power Authority, which infamously billed a community $23 for hanging American flags—lose human credibility.

Adapting to the Unknown

In a VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) world, adherence to outdated playbooks is dangerous. Whether facing a battlefield casualty or a corporate crisis like Hurricane Sandy, agility and ethics must override bureaucracy. Leaders empowered to break rules in service of the mission foster resilience; those chained by fear of misconduct create paralysis.

Levine’s Principle

“When the rules don’t serve humanity, rewrite them.” Courage means protecting people before policies.

Levine closes with a powerful call: find your personal credo—your three words—and live by them. Just as West Point’s guiding triad is Duty, Honor, Country, every leader can define a private compass that shapes daily decisions. For Levine, the words are simple but profound: “Count on me.”

The Power of Consistency

She recounts how living that mantra—being dependable even under impossible conditions—earned her breakout speaking career. When a keynote speaker canceled, Levine stepped in overnight, stayed up all night preparing new material, and delivered an inspiring talk to 6,000 attendees at dawn. That speech transformed her trajectory. Reliability creates opportunity.

Living Your Credo Daily

A mantra isn’t a slogan; it’s an active standard of behavior. Levine urges you to pick words that push you to act—whether it’s “Serve with integrity,” “Lift others higher,” or “Never stop learning.” The trick is alignment: when values, actions, and outcomes match, trust compounds. People notice when you live your credo without compromise.

Leadership as Legacy

Levine ends where she began: with self-leadership. Titles fade, but character doesn’t. “Count on me” is about dependability in storms—on the ice, in the boardroom, or in everyday relationships. The highest peak you’ll ever climb, she reminds readers, is being the person others can trust when the air gets thin.