Fernando Parrado is one of the 16
survivors of the Andes’ plane crash of 1972.
This is his story and his lessons for today’s world.
At first sigh Fernando Parrado seems a normal man. He’s tall, sturdy, he
has straight brown hair and he’s wearing a kaki chamois leather jacket,
his gestures are a sign of his tranquility and patience.
Uruguayan successful business man who not only chairs a familiar business,
Seler Parrado which is one of the biggest ironmonger’s in Uruguay, but
also has two T.V. production companies and a partnership of a cable
television company; He’s married since 1979 and has two daughters of 16
and 19-years-old. Not a single thing out of the ordinary life.
But he is in fact all but a normal guy. He’s exceptional.
Nando- as he is usually known- is one of the survivors, together with
other 15 people, of one of the most famous air tragedies of the history:
The crash of the Uruguayan’s Air Force plane at the Andes, between
Argentina and Chile, in 1972.
The plane was taking the Old Christians –name
of the rugby team from a Montevideo’s school- which was going to play in
Santiago de Chile. One of the players was Nando. To that special event,
Parrado had invited his mother and his little sister.
After a night in Mendoza, Argentina – they couldn’t cross the Andes in the
planned moment due to bad weather conditions- the plane took off early.
But the pilot made a bad calculation about his position and the plane
crashed, leaving its tail in one place, the wings in another place and the
entire fuselage in a snow and stone valley, where only the summits and the
mountains which surrounded the place could be seen.
Fighting against the extremely low
temperatures –less than 40 degrees below cero at night-, the hunger, the
thirst, the crush –the fuselage was the only place where they could take
refuge-, and against the boredom in the summit of one of the highest and
inhospitable mountains in the world during 72 days, 16 people could
survive. They could make it with all the probabilities working against
them.
And it could be say that they made it in
one part thanks to Nando, who together with a team-mate, Roberto Canessa,
risked his life climbing mountains that even professional mountaineers
consider
to be quite a feat. Without any technical equipment, without strengths in
their bodies, without any food –except for some human meat the had in an
impromptu suitcase, the only food they eat while were there- and with not
enough protection against the cold, these two guys of 21 years-old set off
on a ten days travesty until they could contact other human beings. Thank
to these guys, the other 14 survivors who stayed up in the mountain, in a
valley called “El Valle De Las Lágrimas”, could be rescued. The Valley
stays just as it was 30 year ago, except for a little iron cross that
rises over an impromptu stoned altar under which some of the victims are
buried. Nando’s mother and sister are there –Eugenia and Susana
respectively-, he had to bury them with his own hands, in an arid and
freezing glacier. His mother died instantly. Susana survived the impact
but died few days after it due to the injuries she had. She died in his
brother’s arms.
“The hardest thing
to me was burying my mother and my sister with my own hands in the ice”
says Nando.
From that hart-rending experience in the personal pint of view lots of
lessons remained that Nando has made sure of apply in his life, and that
today are from great application in the business world. To overcome the
tragedy the survivors had to learn how to work in teams, to be always
paying attention to the good ideas, to innovate, to make decisions in
extreme pressure conditions. They were besieged by the death for two
months, but they beat it. That makes what they did at the mountains very
valid –their way of working, of taking decisions, of lead-.
“The biggest lesson for me had to do,
mostly, with taking decisions”, says Nando, sat at a table in a hotel at
San Francisco, drinking a Coca-Cola and talking about his experience.
“It seems ridiculous what I’m going to say, but generally taking a
decision doesn’t take me more than 30 seconds, no matter how hard it is.
Because at the Andes I decided in 30 the way in which I was going to die.
When I was at the mountains and saw what I had in front of my eyes I was
dead”.
He was remembering his crossing to be
rescued. He remembered the moment when, after climbing to the summit of
the highest mountain that could be seen from the place where the fuselage
was, he realized that they weren’t where he thought –at the West, near
Chile- but that the only things they had ahead were more snow, more stones,
more nothing. “It was at that moment that I decided to die walking and no
watching into my friend eyes [Canessa]. Any other decision compared with
the decision of how are you going to die is a joke. So every time I have
to decide something I remember that moment”
Taking decision rapidly is a great virtue.
Virtue that today’s businessmen, who are immersed in a competitive world,
need to have. Those who don’t decide, die. “ If I take the wrong decision
I have time to correct it”, says Parrado “It’s far better decide and make
mistakes than not taking decisions, because there is always time to go
back” Without knowing it, in the middle of nowhere, Nando learnt a lesson
which is essential in the business world: The biggest risk of all is
decide not to take risks. Nothing is more dangerous than the status quo.
To illustrate that first lesson, Nando
sets an example: “What we had to eat (human meat) is a perfect example of
decision-making. Is logical consequence of the time, of the way in which
your mind starts to think there. There were just three options: 1) wait
and die all together in the plane’s fuselage looking at each other eyes,
but nobody wanted that option; 2) commit massive suicide, go hand in hand
and jump into a crevasse. 3) eat human meat” Although it was a dramatic
decision, they all decided in group to opt for the third option.
But Nando has not only learnt about
decisions. He learnt as well that although taking decisions democratically
is a good option for some moments, there is a time in which somebody has
to decide, because is not always easy for a group to reach a decision. The
person who decides that becomes the leader of that organization or in this
case the leader of a group of young men fighting day after day, second by
second, for their lives. “The leader is not always the person who is
called in that way”, reflects Nando Parrado. “With the time, leaders were
changing for his own actions. Nobody said: you are going to be our leader.
There were three or four leaders who leaded us trough their actions,
without knowing it. It was impossible to think further than some minutes
ahead because we were freezing. how could we think about postulate a
leader?
Lesson number two: leaders haven’t born
being leaders but they develop their skills on the way. They develop with
their actions. Important lesson for today’s businessmen, who in general
believe they deserve to be the next on in the leadership of an company
just for being so-and-so or for having a relationship with every Tom, Dick
and Harry. They are wrong. The experience, the execution, the results all
of this make you a leader. If you don’t have these qualities you’re not
going to exercise a good leadership. Parrado’s words concerning this:
“Leaders are normal people who have extraordinary actions in difficult
situations”. To Nando a leader has to have personality, he has to be
charismatic without knowing it , in that way people will believe in him
and finally he must do things properly. Nobody follows a leader if he
doesn’t do the right things. In other words, leaders are those who achieve
good results, those who reach their purposes.
But leaders don’t exist if there isn’t
any group. Contrary to that, true leaders can work in a team and let the
others work too, they let each member to contribute with their experiences
to make the team function as a whole. “We were supportive with each other,
we weren’t selfish, which is very important. We have never been so good
working in teams as we were at the Andes”, says Nando
Third lesson: teamwork. You achieve good results only if you do the things
together, coordinately. There are few people able to achieve exceptional
results, lots of teams able to generate those exceptional results. The
fact that Nando Parrado is alive proves that. Nobody would have survived
that accident if it had been alone.
A team, however, don’t function just
because they do. They need to have an objective. It’s useless having the
best group of people, the most coordinated one, the best executor, if they
don’t know where they are going to. For them the objective must be not
only unique, but also sheared. Every member of the group must be totally
convinced of the objective and that they are going to achieve it, to reach
it. “Our goal was survive… all our instinct, all our strength, all our
intelligence, the teamwork, all designated to a unique and only objective:
get out of that place on our own (because we had heard on the radio that
nobody was going to rescue us). In my personal case I knew that I should
keep all my strengths to the summer (the plane crashed in October, winter
at the southern hemisphere) because we couldn’t even try to get out of
there with that cold, you sink into the snow up to your waist. I used to
say: If I become sad and cry, I’m going to lose salt through my tears. So,
I can’t afford the luxury of losing that energy. I closed my mind to all
suffering and I turned into a survivor machine. My only objective: getting
out of there alive”
It was that obsession with the objectives
and results that kept Nando and his friends alive. That obsession and
visualization is what keep companies alive.
Fourth lesson: Those companies with a clear objective, that know what they
want to do and where they want to go, and execute their action always
thinking about reaching that place, are the ones which achieve their goals.
Those ones that don’t have a clear
objective, won’t make it. That’s life, that’s business. And the daily
actions have to be designated to that objective too, to justify it.
“We had a defined objective in time, place, space, what were we going to
do, everything… the rest was a daily survival routine, which justified the
objective instead of clouded it”, says Nando about the balance of the long
term objectives and the short term ones, good advise to the businessmen
who in general don’t make balance between routine and final goal.
Another lesson he learnt at the peak of
the mountain is that creativity is needed to find solutions. You have to
innovate. During the time at the mountain the survivors had to put all
their creativity to get out of there alive. There are lots of examples of
creative thought. The suitcases’ wall that the team captain built to stop
the wind entering into the fuselage, as a single example, saved their
lives. If that wall hadn’t existed, they would have frozen just on the
first night.
Canessa, Nando’s crossing mate, invented
also a sort of hammock to support the most wounded people, made up with
belts and two metal poles (although finally both people who was there died
due to their weakness, they were alive because they were comfortable).
Equally creative the invention to melt
the snow and in that way drink water, which in Parrado’s opinion was more
problematic than the food (human body become dehydrated five times faster
in 11.500 feet high, which was the high of the fuselage, over the sea
level). To melt the snow they make plates with pieces of aluminum they
found. The sunlight melted the ice just to drink it on the day. Finally
with a cold insulator they found in the plane’s tail they made a sleeping
bag to Parrado and Canessa’s crossing. Without it they would have died
froze in some of the summits they climbed.
The present
Two days after talking
with Punto-com, Nando Parrado told his story to an audience of 15.000
people at San Francisco’s Centre of Conventions. When he finished, the
audience who had heard speechless what he told, stood up and clapped
during five minutes, not only for his courage but also for his
determination.
And above all for
his most important lesson: “Today I can define which things are important
and which ones are not. I like business and I want to be successful but
only if the other aspects of my life are O.K. We can’t deny that today our
families are the most important thing for us. A hundred per cent of the
people who were at the Andes wanted to came back to their families, not to
their contracts, studies or money. We burnt all the money of the plane
(7.000 dollars); we burnt it to obtain warmth. That means that money is
important only if the other things are on its right place. I’d rather a
successful family than a successful business”.
That’s Nando. Those are his lessons. |
