Jamie Clarke
Most plans survive the first setback and collapse at the second. Teams that were briefed on the strategy freeze when the weather turns, and the people who should be leading end up managing the noise. The real question is what a team does in the hours after the original plan stops working, when morale, information and authority are all moving at once.
Jamie Clarke is an expedition leader, performance coach and Haskayne School of Business faculty member who helps senior teams lead under pressure when the original plan breaks down.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Jamie Clarke
- He has an unusually specific evidence base for leadership under pressure: two Mount Everest summits, the Seven Summits, a 1,126 km camel crossing of the Empty Quarter, and two failed Everest attempts that shape how he talks about recovery.
- He is a named performance coach to the 2018 Stanley Cup winning Washington Capitals and Hockey Canada’s 2018 PyeongChang team, so his material translates into elite team environments, not just general audiences.
- His academic base at the University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business Centre for Advanced Leadership gives the work a teaching structure, not only a story arc.
- He pairs expedition narrative with operator experience, having built and run LiveOutThere.com through growth, a Profit Hot 50 ranking in 2013 and eventual closure, so the failure material is first-hand.
- His delivery is built for senior audiences that have heard every motivational speaker before; the work is about decisions under uncertainty, not summit photography.
Biography highlights
- Summited Mount Everest on 23 May 1997 and again on 17 May 2010, after two earlier unsuccessful attempts.
- Completed the Seven Summits between 1993 and 2008.
- Crossed the Empty Quarter of Arabia by camel in 1999, a 1,126 km, 40-day expedition with brother Leigh Clarke and Bruce Kirkby.
- Associate adjunct professor and fellow at the University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business, Centre for Advanced Leadership.
- Performance coach for the 2018 Stanley Cup winning Washington Capitals and Hockey Canada in PyeongChang 2018.
- Author of Everest to Arabia (2001) and co-author of The Power of Passion with Alan Hobson, later republished as Above All Else: The Everest Dream.
- Founder of LiveOutThere.com, ranked No. 39 on Profit Magazine’s 2013 Hot 50.
Biography
The second Everest attempt came apart at 8,300 metres in 1994. The team Clarke was part of had the summit in reach and turned back. He went home, rebuilt the expedition, and made the top in 1997, then returned and did it again in 2010. Two failed attempts sit on the same CV as two successful ones, and that is the part of the story he now teaches from.
The work is about what teams do in the hours after the plan stops working. Clarke has built a leadership practice on specific expedition evidence rather than metaphor: the 1997 and 2010 Everest summits, the 1,126 km Empty Quarter crossing by camel in 1999, the Seven Summits completed across fifteen years, and the 2019 Mongolian motorbike traverse with his son Khobe. Each expedition produced a different failure mode, which is the material he uses with senior teams.
His academic base is the University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business, where he is an associate adjunct professor and fellow in the Centre for Advanced Leadership. His coaching work has been with elite performance environments under real stakes, including the Washington Capitals through their 2018 Stanley Cup run and Hockey Canada at the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics. Barry Trotz’s on-record comment after the Capitals won reads as a working review, not a blurb.
Clarke also operated as a founder. LiveOutThere.com grew into a Profit Hot 50 retailer in 2013 and closed in 2017. He has run the inside of a business that did well and then did not, which is why the failure and recovery material in his talks sounds like first-hand accounting rather than adventure content.
Key speaking topics
- Leadership under uncertainty
- Team performance in high-stakes environments
- Recovery after setback and failure
- Resilience and decision-making under stress
- Expedition leadership as organisational case study
- Culture and morale in long-cycle projects
- Coaching elite teams through pressure
Ideal for
- CEOs and executive teams going into contested strategic bets
- Leadership development and executive education cohorts
- Sales and performance leaders preparing teams for long, high-pressure cycles
- Boards and senior groups that have already heard the standard motivational set
Audience outcomes
- A sharper sense of how high-performing teams behave in the hours after a plan breaks.
- Specific expedition decisions, named and dated, that map onto organisational choices under pressure.
- A working language for separating recoverable setbacks from terminal ones.
- A clearer view of the leader’s job when morale, information and authority are all moving at once.
- Practical reference points drawn from elite hockey and Olympic environments, not generic motivation.
Talks
A leadership talk drawn from Clarke’s two failed and two successful Everest expeditions, focused on how senior teams hold their nerve through setback and recovery.
Key takeaways:
- How high-performing teams behave when the first plan stops working.
- What recoverable failure looks like, and what it costs to reset.
- Why passion is an operational variable, not a personality trait.
A talk that maps expedition planning onto organisational strategy, drawing on Clarke’s operator experience with LiveOutThere.com alongside his expedition record.
Key takeaways:
- How to pressure-test a plan before you commit capital or people to it.
- Where expedition discipline belongs inside a business and where it does not.
- What founders learn when a growth company goes into decline.
A crisis leadership talk built from specific expedition moments when conditions changed faster than the team’s plan.
Key takeaways:
- How to make decisions with partial information and real stakes.
- Why communication discipline matters more than optimism.
- What leaders owe their teams when the environment turns hostile.
A narrative keynote built around the 1999 camel crossing of Arabia’s great southern desert, used as a study in long-cycle team endurance.
Key takeaways:
- What holds a team together across forty days of grinding work.
- Why perseverance is a leadership skill, not a personal quality.
- How small cultural choices scale into expedition outcomes.