Adventure Trips Are the New Business Dinners

AS SEEN IN CONDÉ NAST TRAVELER

To build high-performance teams, many corporate executives are turning toward something riskier than a bottle of Bordeaux on the company card.

For Tom Hogan, chairman and CEO of Kony, Inc., an enterprise mobility company based in Austin, Texas, work dinners lost their lure years ago.
“At some point, most people in the corporate world have been to a million four-star restaurants,” he says. “It gets old. People quasi-resent the forced march of the old, tired approach.”

That’s why he’s looked far beyond set tables to build a close-knit business team—to whitewater rafting trips along West Virginia’s wild Upper Gauley River, ski outings with former Olympians, and midnight snowmobiling tours through the Rocky Mountains. Hogan has been embarking on such adventure retreats for close to 20 years now. He’s not alone.

“More and more, organizations are using adventures, either real or virtual, to anchor their business messaging,” says Shane Toohey, founder of leadership development company Peak Teams, a company that films real-life adventures like mountaineering, sailing or traversing wild, remote terrain, then uses them as in-office simulations to build business skills for clients. The company presents real-life footage from, say, climbing New Zealand’s treacherous Mount Cook range, pausing to present obstacles, challenges, and decisions to groups that then use the simulation to figure out how to move forward.

Similarly, companies such as California-based Adventure Out, Outward Bound Professional, and—as of just this year—retail company Life Is Good all curate corporate outdoor adventure trips worldwide. Read the rest of this article here.