BOSS reconnects execs with nature; teaches survival skills relevant to job

Business Report Correspondent

BOULDER ? A morning at work might include sending and receiving a blizzard of e-mails, faxing a report to a marketing team in Hong Kong and leaving countless messages on voice-mail boxes around the globe. How’s that for connecting with hundreds of people without ever seeing the light of day or sharing a single word with a co-worker?

Josh Bernstein, president and chief executive officer of Boulder Outdoor Survival School, known familiarly as BOSS, thinks that techno-driven communication so prevalent in American business today can have the damaging effect of actually driving people apart and disconnecting them from the natural world that lies outside their reflective glass box buildings. “There is more to living than technology and dollars,” Bernstein says. “Our technology dependence needs some balance.”

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Bernstein, who has been with BOSS for 13 years, wants to restore balance by inviting corporate denizens to leave their cubicles and workstations for a few days and head out into the desert wilderness with little more than a blanket, a few extra articles of clothing, a couple of water bottles and a knife. They will sleep under a pile of leaves or a wool blanket, navigate across arduous terrain with a map and compass, build a fire without matches, and locate their food and water in the wild.

According to BOSS, when people have this kind of unique and intense experience in a challenging wilderness setting, the payoffs go beyond simply learning wilderness survival skills and toning a flabby, sedentary body. A BOSS experience in a Utah canyon directly correlates to a boardroom in a Louisville office building, for example.

Participants can take what they learn in the field and hone healthy group dynamics, strengthen teamwork skills, optimize communication strategies and build trust within a group ? lessons that can be brought back to the office and implemented to produce a more pleasant and productive work environment. “Corporate executives have been under served in leadership training,” says Frank Hugelmeyer, president of the Outdoor Recreation Coalition of America, a Boulder-based trade association for the outdoor industry. “I think they’re pretty smart to be launching what they’re launching.”

BOSS has been offering wilderness survival and primitive living skills expeditions since 1968. It distinguishes itself from competing outdoor adventure organizations by eschewing any reliance on modern outdoor camping gear, like tents, Gore-tex, head lamps or backpacks. It also tries to imbue its students in the ancient skills of the aboriginal peoples of southern Utah ? the Anasazi, Paiute and Fremont Indians.

Now, BOSS has decided to go after the potentially lucrative corporate sector. Jill Christensen, a head instructor for BOSS who has been with the school for six years, will likely get a chance to work with this new population. “I look forward to seeing a bunch of businessmen and women getting a little dirty and hungry,” she laughs.

The first office jockeys to get down and dirty will likely be from the Denver metro area. BOSS is based in Boulder, but the organization runs most of its courses in the canyon country of Utah. From its location on 33rd Street, BOSS is launching its Professional Development Program. “We’re really focusing on the Front Range and the U.S. 36 corridor because there’s a lot of high-tech activity here, and people are generally outdoorsy,” Bernstein says.

BOSS is offering two Professional Development Programs to corporate clientele. The Executive Leadership Course courts individual business leaders such as executives and managers. The Custom Field Course is aimed at professional work groups and teams who are looking to gain new insights about themselves in a wilderness setting.

Walt Woolf, professional development coordinator at BOSS, emphasizes that because BOSS will be taking corporate students out for longer trips than the usual one-day company retreat or rope-challenge course, the impact of the experience will be more lasting. “Most studies have shown that the longer the exposure, the longer the effects of the experience are going to last,” Woolf says. “With other programs, you go out one day, come back and try to figure it out.”

The Executive Leadership Course is a fixed, five-day program in the wilderness that features not only survival skills, but facilitates a discussion on issues that executives face on the job, like project management, vision and strategy implementation and leadership effectiveness. The cost to executives is just shy of $3,200 per head.

The Custom Field Course can vary in cost and length, though BOSS recommends a minimum of four days. BOSS personnel meet with the team beforehand to assess the particular corporate culture of the company and evaluate its needs. Once the course is complete, BOSS sends instructors to the company to do a post-program review to insure that the participants have been given time to fairly reflect on the experience and appreciate the lessons they learned. For both professional courses, BOSS suggests that group size be limited to about nine people.

It’s clear that now is a good time to be offering wilderness survival courses. “Right now, we’re in an extended period where outdoor recreation has been embraced by the public,” Hugelmeyer says. According to the Outdoor Recreation Coalition of America’s publication State of the Industry, Americans spent $17.8 billion on outdoor recreation gear and activities in 1999. Also, 111 million Americans took part in outdoor activities, like kayaking, biking and hiking that year.

Despite this enthusiasm for outdoor life, Americans are still slavishly addicted to their television sets and BOSS has benefited from that fact as well, especially with the success of the show “Survivor,” which casts a group of strangers purportedly trying to survive at a remote location while camera crews follow them around. Though BOSS has not done consulting work for “Survivor,” it did lend its advice to the producers of “Cast Away,” a movie about survival on a deserted island starring Tom Hanks. BOSS instructors were also charged with leading Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu and Cameron Diaz on a course to help prepare them for their roles in the film “Charlie’s Angels.”

Despite the high-profile, celebrity-driven connections BOSS has made, it still has to sell a very physically demanding program to a community of business workers. “They are certainly seeking a narrow niche,” says Bruce Fitch, director of Colorado Outward Bound, an independently chartered arm of Outward Bound-USA, a leading outdoor adventure group. “I think it’s a tough sell. Most of the corporate sector I’ve seen needs a higher level of amenities. There are not that many companies that want to go out and rough it that much.”

Ironically, the current popularity of the survivalist movement could be one of the biggest challenges BOSS faces in screening out the kind of students who could pressure the organization to soften its approach. “The whole survival scene is getting more trendy,” says Christensen, who is getting ready to lead a course in March. “Unfortunately, we do get people who have absolutely no clue what they’re getting into.”

While students have quit BOSS courses while out in the field, Christensen says, the organization takes great effort to make it clear to potential students that they need to be prepared for a tough and often physically uncomfortable experience. No less is true with BOSS corporate programs.

“It’s not for everyone,” Bernstein says. “If you want to be thirsty, hungry and exhausted, come along. You have to want to be outside of your comfort zone.”

Nonetheless, in order to entice potential corporate customers into its Professional Development Programs, BOSS plans to allow more customization and accommodation than it would normally would with its core programs. Michael Dennisoff, who was a BOSS student six years ago and will be working periodically with the organization to pique corporate interest in the program, applauds this strategy. “You want to stretch people so that they can grow, but you don’t want to stretch them until they tear,” he says.

BOSS hasn’t specifically decided how accommodating it will be with its new corporate students, though the organization makes it clear in its marketing literature that it plans to listen to what the customer wants and design a course with those needs in mind. Does that mean yes to sleeping bags and a cuisine more appetizing than the grasshoppers and ant larvae that BOSS participants often find themselves relegated to eating in the field?

“We don’t want to provide such a high shock value that we turn people off,” Bernstein says. The question is whether BOSS can take on what Bernstein readily admits is a more lucrative market sector without compromising the organization’s mission.

Fitch, of Outward Bound, says it won’t be easy for BOSS. “Every organization that I’ve known has had to wrestle with this issue,” he said. “How much will the corporations take you off track?”

Dave Wescott, a previous owner of BOSS and the man who sold the business to Bernstein in 1997, has led hundreds of BOSS programs since the 1970s. He is confident that the organization’s stable of 35 to 40 instructors will keep the program true to its mission. “If there is any group that will keep the program on a straight path, it’s the staff,” Wescott says. All BOSS instructors are required to be students first and then must successfully complete an apprenticeship and staff-training program.

Christensen understands that flexibility will be needed with the new corporate programs. “I understand that we will need to cater to these businesses, but only a little bit,” she says. “We don’t want to change the curriculum because that would be selling out.”

While Bernstein would not disclose what companies he plans to begin working with, he says BOSS wants to woo healthful and earth-friendly organizations, along the lines of a Whole Foods and Celestial Seasonings, where the corporate culture may already reflect an environmentally conscious relationship to the earth.

BOSS will review the progress of its Professional Development Programs at the end of the first season and then decide what it needs to do to preserve the critical balance of providing corporations with invaluable leadership training and staying true to its mission as the preeminent survival and primitive skills school in the country.

What is not in doubt, says Hugelmeyer of the Outdoor Recreation Coalition of America, is that BOSS is in the right place at the right time. “With the increase in technology in our houses, cars and even belts, our desire to escape is going to increase,” he says. “And we often choose outdoor recreation as our escape.”Contact John Aguilar at (303) 440-4950 or e-mail at jaguilar@bcbr.com