Back in the early 1970s when I lived and worked in Switzerland, I joined the Swiss Alpine Club and spent several glorious summers moving from novice to intermediate climber. It turned out that mountain climbing was more to my taste than rock climbing; perhaps this was because there was more variety in mountain climbing which, after all, has rock climbing as a subset. Or perhaps it was because mountain climbing placed more emphasis on stamina over peak athletic performance. In any event, I learned that to be successful in this activity required merging basic technical skills with good people skills and good judgment. I found that there were lots of climbers but few really good climbingparty leaders. So I tried to figure out what made the good leaders really good.

All the people I sought to emulate had come into their own at a point when they were definitely past the peak of their physical prowess, but had accumulated incredible judgment and people skills. While they were still technically strong enough to “climb lead”that is, be first on the ropeit was their other leadership strengths that distinguished them.

Later on, when part of my job was to evaluate software development managers, I noticed that tremendous similarities existed between the good managers and those lead climbers I had worked with on the peaks. Perhaps, I reasoned, it was because the two activities had a lot in common. This led to thinking of a mountain climbing expedition as a metaphor for a software development project. In working out the details of this metaphor, I came to embrace it more and more, although, as with all metaphors, one needs to be careful not to carry it too far. […]