Jamie Clarke

Extreme Adventurer, Expedition Leader, Olympic-level Performance Coach, Business Builder, Master Motivator, and High-Energy Storyteller

Topics: Adventurers, Elite Performance, Leadership, Attitude, Business, Business Leadership, Entrepreneur, Inspirational & Motivational, Resilience, Storytelling, Strategy, Productivity

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Biography

Business IS an adventure—and mountain-climber Jamie Clarke walks you through how to strategize and succeed in your own ventures. Jamie challenges his audience to reach their unique Everest and guides them towards building and leading teams to success.

This acclaimed adventurer and entrepreneur challenges individuals to brave their own Everest with memorable insights and actionable strategies on leadership, risk management, and defining and achieving your goals. As a mountain-climber, Jamie reached the Everest summit twice—but only after his first two attempts to reach the peak were cut short by deadly storms, leaving him only a few feet short of the summit. Determined and dedicated, he reached his goal in 1997 and 2010. Jamie is one of a handful of people in the world to hold the rare accomplishment of climbing the Seven Summits. Always one for new adventures, Jamie rode camels across the Empty Quarter of Arabia, motorbiked across Mongolia with his son, and has served as a performance coach for Olympians, the NFL, Hockey Canada and the 2018 Stanley Cup-winning Washington Capitals. Jamie is currently a fellow and associate professor at the University of Calgary’s Haskayne Business school where he teaches and mentors in the Centre for Advanced Leadership.

With gentle Canadian humor, Jamie walks you through his planning process on mountain expeditions and how to apply his lessons for business strategies. Mountain-climbing can mean plenty of risk; Jamie provides essential tips on handling risk management as you navigate challenges on your path. But Jamie offers the key to scaling the heights: retain your passion while nurturing and encouraging your team. His focus: creating an honest and authentic culture in your company that stays true to its mission.

Jamie relays the lessons he learned as the former CEO of a mountaineer clothing e-commerce business, which earned him multiple nominations for National e-commerce Innovation Awards by Canada Post. The mountain-climber’s high-energy message inspires you to set high goals, overcome obstacles, and remain passionate in your own entrepreneurial adventures.

Videos

Speech TopicsExpand each topic to learn more

The Map is Not the Terrain: Charting a New Course for Leadership

Jamie Clarke knows a lot about leadership and uncertainty. He has spent his entire adult life embracing the unknown. From his days as a world-renowned adventure leader and elite climber to becoming a successful business builder and professional sports consultant to a Stanley Cup winning hockey team, Jamie has navigated through countless high pressure and challenging landscapes. What is always certain, yet finds individuals and teams consistently unprepared for is this: Uncertainty leads to indecision. Indecision leads to fear. Fear leads to chaos. Chaos ends in failure.

This program is more than 30 years in the making. It takes you inside the mindset and the leadership qualities that build team cultures that don’t shrink from uncertainty, but succeed when others fail. What to do when your terrain map no longer works? These cultures are everything from teams of business professionals, expeditions struggling to survive negative 70 degree blizzards in the death zone of 25,000 feet, or professional sports teams finding their collective way to break through past failures and become champions.

With an infectious sense of humor and palpable, authentic passion, Jamie challenges his audiences to think differently about success, failure, hard work and fear. In his visually stunning and always charismatic and inspiring style, audiences will learn how to:

- Adapt to forces outside of one’s control.
- Uphold one’s mission despite the unknowns and the lack of perfect information.
- Learn from failure quickly and adjust your plans in real-time.
- Conquer fear through focus and practice.
- Reframe leadership through the lenses of trust, humility, reliance and empathy.

Above All Else: The Power of Passion

With humor and palpable passion, Jamie Clarke challenges audiences to think differently about success, failure, passion, hard work and fear, as he shares insight from his journeys scaling the world’s highest mountains, trekking through the most dangerous places and starting his own successful retail business. Perfect for audiences seeking expertise on risk-taking, project management, and team building, Clarke’s customized presentations deliver powerful perspective on learning from failure, the art of grunt work, conquering fear through focus, and above all—living life with passion.

Testimonials

This is the second time I book ed Jamie and there are no words to describe your ability to motivate and inspire! Jamie's speech has completely made our event the best one we have ever had!

– Heather Brooks - Synergy Worldwide

Jamie’s presentation was extremely well received and fit in perfectly with the messaging of the meeting.Jamie took some notes during the executive presentations that preceded him and incorporated them perfectly into his talk.

– Mark Sacco - Shire Pharmaceuticals

Jamie’s recent talk was his sixth at one of our events, he continues to receive outstanding applause from our attendees. Jamie did a brilliant job relating our business applications to his adventure experiences and expedition planning along with his themes of overcoming fear and finding success in failure. These principles come alive due to his energetic presentation style, his vibrant personality and superb use of humor in his stories.

– Pamela K. Vaughn - Metavante

Jamie was awesome! Few speakers can keep my attention for every second of a one hour session - Jamie did. I couldn’t wait to hear what he was going to say next or where his story was headed. He did a great job of picking up on some issues in our open Q&A with our CEO and weaving them perfectly into his message. Amazing!

– Brian Galloway - Siemens Building Technologies

Your presentation was absolutely spectacular! You tell a wonderful story with great passion, humor and a sincere humility. The parallels you were able to draw between your experiences and the challenges people in the audience face in both their personal and professional lives really hit home. I have been in this business a long time and that is first standing ovation I have ever witnessed at a customer event.

– Jim Sweeney - Distributed Systems Services, Inc.

First and foremost: WOW! I attend a great many conferences (too many?) and get to see some pretty high profile speakers. Your talk was one of the most captivating and memorable I have ever seen. You made me laugh till my sides hurt and moments later,your words brought tears rolling down my cheeks. Throughout, I didn't dare divert my attention. In short, you nailed it!

– Gary C. Bhojwani - President & Chief Executive Officer Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America

What Jamie Clarke learned on Everest helped the Caps win on the ice.

– Stanley Cup-winning Coach Barry Trotz