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It Takes a Tribe: Building the Tough Mudder Movement - Hardcover

Dean, Will

 
9780735214699: It Takes a Tribe: Building the Tough Mudder Movement
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0735214697 ISBN 13: 9780735214699
Verlag: PORTFOLIO, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

“Who on earth wants to jump into ice baths and run through fire and wallow in mud on a Sunday afternoon, just for the hell of it?” my professors asked. My gut feeling was—plenty of people.
 
Will Dean, founder of extreme obstacle course Tough Mudder, shares the thrilling inside story of how a scrappy startup grew into a movement whose millions of members feel like co-owners. He shows how other companies can embrace the Tough Mudder playbook by nurturing tribes of passionate fans while constantly experimenting with new risks.
 
After five years as a British counterterrorism officer and two years at Harvard Business School, Dean was determined not to follow his classmates to Wall Street or Silicon Valley. Instead, he pursued his unique vision for an extreme obstacle course—a ten- to twelve-mile gauntlet pushing participants to their limits and helping them surpass those limits together. Instead of cutthroat competition, Tough Mudder would be about continual self-improvement and collective energy. 

It would be about the power of a tribe. 

Dean and his small team launched the first Tough Mudder event in May 2010, hosting 5,000 pioneers at a deserted ski resort in Pennsylvania. Just seven years later, more than 3 million people on four continents have participated at least once, and hundreds of thousands have done so repeatedly. More than 20,000 are so committed that they sport a Tough Mudder tattoo.

Mudders prove the power of fierce and unshakable loyalty to one another and the challenge itself. Proudly sport­ing orange headbands and team uniforms, they’ll run through mud, climb steep walls, face elec­tric shocks, and slide down the side of a moun­tain. The tougher the experience, the greater the satisfaction.
 
It Takes a Tribe shows you how to embody the Tough Mudder spirit and capture the same magic. As a Tough Mudder slogan says, “When was the last time you did something for the first time?”

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Will Dean is the founder and CEO of Tough Mudder Inc., which now has annual revenues of more than $100 million and has raised more than $13 million for charity. His honors include EY’s Entrepreneur Of The Year® Emerging Award; Crain’s annual 40 Under 40 list; and Fortune’s 40 Under 40: Ones to Watch list. A native of a mining town in the English Midlands, he now divides his time between London and New York.

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Chapter 1

In the Beginning The First Mudder

One jumps into the fray then figures out what to do next

Napoleon Bonaparte

In May 2010, I found myself halfway up a small mountain in a deserted ski resort in Allentown, Pennsylvania, surrounded by piles of long metal poles. There was a fine rain in the air. Shouts of desperation could occasionally be heard from the pinewoods in the distance, as if from a retreating army. I was speaking to a reporter from Allentown's local paper. It was the day of the first Tough Mudder-the first day of the rest of my life-and things were not going entirely to plan.

The reporter was looking at me with some concern. I had not slept for a week, and for a couple of months had existed solely on caffeine and anxiety. A large, angry boil had erupted on one side of my face. To hide it I was scraggily unshaven and standing oddly at an angle, as if squinting around a corner, affecting what I hoped was an air of lofty British authority.

"So, Will," the reporter said, trying to catch my eye, "what are you doing here today in Allentown?"

This was a question that loomed large in my own thoughts. Though usually with a couple of stronger words added between "what" and "are." There was a short answer and a long answer.

The short answer went something like this. "I am trying to create seventeen obstacles-partly out of these long metal poles-on the edge of a town I know only from a Billy Joel song. These obstacles must be both dramatically risky and generally safe and spaced out over a seven-mile course up and down this mountain and through these pinewoods. Neither I nor my team of volunteers-mostly friends from England-actually have any direct experience building obstacles. Nor do we have any blueprints for them. Still, we have been doing this (with the help of the ski resort maintenance department) to the best of our ability so that several thousand people, many of them veterans of the world's most demanding endurance events, or members of the U.S. military fresh home from war zones or officers serving in the local police and fire departments, will not shortly be chasing me up this mountain, over those obstacles, and demanding their money back."

The longer answer was even more complicated.

I was twenty-nine years old. Two years earlier I had walked out on a fast-track career in the British Foreign Office, in which I had worked intensively for five years on classified antiterrorist operations in the Middle East and Afghanistan. I had spent those subsequent two years and the little money I had saved acquiring an MBA at Harvard Business School, in the possibly misguided belief that by doing so I would learn how to be an entrepreneur.

Most of my peers from Harvard, who had also spent two years and all that money, were by now counting the zeros on job offers from Wall Street private equity firms. Or playing volleyball with their stock options on a campus in Silicon Valley. My own efforts in that career-oriented direction consisted of a six-week trial at the elite management consulting firm Bain & Co., mostly, if I'm honest, on my mother's long-ago insistence that I at least "try a proper job." My enthusiasm for suit wearing and salary drawing had become boredom by day three. Boredom that I imagined would be my primary experience, had I stayed, for the remaining thirty years of my career.

My subsequent inactivity, and its effect on my personal balance sheet, had not gone unnoticed, however.

My girlfriend, Katie, herself recently graduated from Harvard Law School and equally weighed down by debt, had generously, if pointedly, offered to support me "for a year" if bad came to worse.

Citibank, the owner of my student loan, was proving less supportive. My "relationship manager" had called earlier that week to ask the $100,000 question: when, and by what means, would I start making payments against their bet on my future? He gave me the helpful advice that, if I did not start now, my $100,000 question would quickly become a $150,000 one.

I had, I believed, developed habits of strategic thinking in practice in my years working in counterterrorism and in theory in my time studying at Harvard. Still, standing halfway up that mountain, my strategizing had somehow led me to decide that the most logical next step in my life was this: I was going to create a weekend adult obstacle course, with the help of some coerced friends, at Bear Creek Ski Resort outside Allentown, Pennsylvania, in the off-season.

Neither of these answers, short or long, was what I said to the reporter.

I talked instead about my hopes for what we were billing as "probably the toughest event on the planet," and I took a stab at describing our as yet unformed Tough Mudder tribe. "If you are going to describe what a Tough Mudder is," I said, "you have to describe what they are not. They are not marathon runners or triathletes. They are not guys who wax their legs so they can save five seconds on their finish time. There is no pretense about them or showing off. They get on with it. They don't moan. A Tough Mudder has fear but he or she overcomes it."

I talked about how Tough Mudder had been deliberately conceived not as a race or another Iron Man or marathon but as an untimed challenge. About how the course could only be negotiated with help from friends and teammates and strangers-and that as such it tested a particular idea of achievement, based on mutual cooperation, not winner-take-all competition. And I ended by saying how, working out of a corner of borrowed office space in a half-abandoned building directly under the Brooklyn Bridge, we had hoped that five hundred people would sign up for this first event after we advertised it on Facebook but how nearly forty-five hundred people had actually done so.

As we spoke, for better or worse, many of those forty-five hundred people were making their way to Allentown. The first Mudders.

Some had already arrived the night before, camping out in tents or sleeping in cars, mostly men, some shirtless in the early morning, all pumped up, expectant. They had enthusiastically taken the Tough Mudder pledge that I had invented with my old high school friend Guy Livingstone, my cofounder, late one night a few weeks earlier. We had tried to pitch the pledge somewhere between Boy Scout's honor and Navy SEAL passing-out parade. It was as serious as it needed to be:

I understand that Tough Mudder is not a race but a challenge.

I put teamwork and camaraderie before my course time.

I do not whine-kids whine.

I help my fellow Mudders complete the course.

I overcome all fears.

The pledge demonstrated our belief that there was a craving among people, particularly young people, not only for challenging experiences but for an authentic set of values they might sign up to and, over the course of the afternoon and beyond, believe in. To test that belief, we had installed tattoo artists at the finish line to ink the whole pledge free of charge on the backs of those Mudders who had taken it most to heart. They were already doing brisk business.

Those forty-five hundred people, those first Mudders, were our great hope. They represented the first evidence that my belief that people would be intrigued by this event-maybe even would flock to it and love it-was not...

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Verlag
PORTFOLIO
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0735214697
ISBN 13 
9780735214699
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
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