Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
At 6,960 m (22,840 ft) on Aconcagua, an hour before sunrise, our guides told the four of us to turn back. The wind was hammering us. Two of the team were broken. My wife Kim looked at the guides and said, "We are going for the summit, with or without you." Six hours later, our flag was on top. More climbers die coming down Aconcagua than going up. We made it back to high camp at last light. That was the third of the Seven Summits I've stood on, after Kilimanjaro and Mt Elbrus. Next up was Mt Everest. Same approach in the boardroom. For over thirty years in IT — the last fifteen as CEO of First Technology Western Cape — I've been running the experiment. We've taken the business to a multi-billion-rand operation today, with multiple awards, including partner of the year, multiple times over, for Microsoft, Dell, and Veeam. We didn't get there by trying to be a smaller version of the listed incumbents. We chose to be a Jack Russell against their Rottweilers — and the Jack Russell wins more fights than the spreadsheet predicts. I'm also a qualified helicopter pilot (Bell JetRangers since 2007), an off-road racer with multiple podiums at the Tankwa 1000km Cross Country Desert Rally, an adventure biker who's traversed Myanmar by motorcycle, and an expedition overlander who's covered 14 African countries in a heavily modified Land Rover Defender 110 called the Monster. She's done 190,000 miles across the continent. Screaming KTM orange. Kept close to standard so the parts are findable wherever she breaks. Along the way, I've made every classic CEO mistake worth making. Hired for the CV instead of the rope. Held positions I should have trimmed. Once planned a Cambodian rainforest expedition to the kilometre, only to watch the leeches read the spreadsheet on day one and laugh. My book *Overlanding Through the Boardroom* (Rockhopper Books, 2024) makes the case directly: the principles that get you across a crocodile-infested water crossing, through a Cambodian rainforest, or through a helicopter pre-flight are the same ones that scale a business and hold a team together under pressure. The conversations continue on *JDV On Air*, my podcast where peer CEOs and serious adventurers unpack the lessons that travel between the two terrains. *Have more fun, take more risks, and be more substantial in somebody's life.*