Jamie Andrew
Resilience is the word leaders use when they want people to keep going without being told how. Most organisations ask for it from their teams and offer very little in return. The gap between that ask and anything a workforce can actually hold onto is where engagement, wellbeing and performance quietly come apart.
Jamie Andrew is a Scottish mountaineer and quadruple amputee who helps organisations think harder about what resilience, recovery and long-term performance actually require from people.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Jamie Andrew
- He speaks from a lived reinvention most audiences will never encounter: five nights trapped on Les Droites, the loss of all four limbs, and a decade of returning to elite mountaineering, including a Matterhorn summit.
- His story gives wellbeing and resilience programmes something concrete to anchor to, rather than another framework slide that no one remembers after the offsite.
- He writes as well as he speaks. Life and Limb won the Banff Mountain Book Festival Prize for Literature, which places him in a different category from most adventure-circuit speakers.
- He has co-founded and sustained a working charity, 500 Miles, which funds prosthetic services in Malawi and Zambia. The organisational craft behind that is part of the talk when the brief calls for it.
- He has delivered in more than 40 countries for audiences at Microsoft, Vodafone, Roche, PepsiCo, Procter and Gamble, Toyota and Tetra Pak, which means he reads corporate rooms and adapts to them.
Biography highlights
- Author of Life and Limb (Portrait, 2004), winner of the Banff Mountain Book Festival Prize for Literature and shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Prize.
- First quadruple amputee to summit the Matterhorn (2016), climb Mont Blanc (2002) and Kilimanjaro, and to complete the London Marathon (2001) and an Ironman triathlon.
- Co-founder, with Olivia Giles, of 500 Miles, a charity providing prosthetic and orthotic services in Malawi and Zambia.
- Keynote experience in more than 40 countries across five continents, with clients including Microsoft, Toyota, Vodafone, Roche, Danone, Procter and Gamble, PepsiCo and Tetra Pak.
- Appointed OBE for services to charity.
Biography
In January 1999, a storm pinned two climbers to the north face of Les Droites in the French Alps for five nights. One did not come home. The survivor, severely frostbitten, reached hospital in septic shock and lost both hands and both feet. That survivor later walked up Blackford Hill in Edinburgh, learned to run on prosthetics, and then went back to the mountains.
The practical point for organisations is not the drama of the accident. It is what happened afterwards. Jamie Andrew has climbed Mont Blanc, Kilimanjaro and the Matterhorn as a quadruple amputee. He finished the London Marathon in 2001 and an Ironman triathlon. Each of those took years of structured relearning, and each required a different approach to preparation, risk, and what a team can reasonably be asked to carry.
The written record matters here. Life and Limb, published by Portrait in 2004, won the Banff Mountain Book Festival Prize for Literature. It is a careful book by someone who has spent time examining what actually held him together through rehabilitation and what did not. That same discipline shows up in the work he co-founded with Olivia Giles: 500 Miles, which has spent years building sustainable prosthetic services in Malawi and Zambia rather than parachuting in equipment and leaving.
Andrew’s audiences tend to be in the middle of something hard: a restructure, a performance reset, a wellbeing programme that is not landing. He gives those rooms a point of reference that is not abstract. The stories are specific, the lessons are tested against a life that kept going, and the register is matter-of-fact rather than inspirational in the usual sense.
Key speaking topics
- Resilience and recovery under extreme pressure
- Team performance in high-stakes conditions
- Risk, judgement and decision-making
- Goal setting across long time horizons
- Motivation and sustained effort
- Change and personal reinvention
- Leadership through adversity
Ideal for
- CHROs and wellbeing leads designing resilience, mental health and engagement programmes that need a credible human anchor
- Leadership teams navigating a major change, restructure or performance reset
- Sales, operations and frontline audiences where motivation and long-horizon effort are the performance issue
- Employee conferences, kick-offs and offsites that need a keynote the room remembers the following Monday
Audience outcomes
- A concrete reference point for what resilience looks like when the stakes are real, not rhetorical
- A clearer sense of what teams owe one another when conditions deteriorate
- Language for talking about recovery, setbacks and reinvention without resorting to slogans
- A sharper view of the difference between motivation that lasts and motivation that fades by the following week