Jamie Clarke

For more than 25 years, Jamie Clarke has worked with elite teams who win: Olympic teams, National Hockey League teams, sales teams, leadership teams, and start-up teams. What connects them all is pressure. With his own hard-won philosophy of decision-making in extremes -- and a storytelling technique that can take you from laughter to tears in minutes -- Clarke recharges audiences with fresh perspectives on success and failure, and risk vs. reward.

Creative, humorous, passionate, and on-point, Clarke walks you through his successful planning process for expeditions and business.

• Essential tips on risk assessment. Check.
• How to listen for cracks in the ice — and your team. Check.
• Weathering storms, literal and metaphorical. Check and check.

Lots of speakers talk about leadership and building, innovating and disrupting, but precious few have really done it from the ground up. As a successful entrepreneur in an outdoor gear and apparel company for more than 14 years, Clarke learned many business lessons the only way possible -- by being in the trenches. He led a 50 person team as the CEO of both a brick and mortar retail company and then successfully pivoted to an e-commerce enterprise.

Through heart-stopping challenges, Clarke has reached the peak of his profession as climber and expedition leader. After failing twice, Clarke regrouped to reach Mt. Everest’s death-zone summit, twice. He has trekked 1,000 miles across the most inhospitable desert on the planet and is one of the few alpinists to reach the “Seven Summits” – the highest peak on each continent.

These entrepreneurial experiences deeply inform his presentations and allow Clarke to speak to business audiences with authority. In short, “He gets it.”

From C-suite leaders running 10 billion dollar companies to boots-on-the-ground salespeople trying to hit quota, from highly technical professionals like engineers to the hard-working blue-collar laborers who make things work, Clarke always connects.

His high-energy programs take you to dangerous places, both real and imagined. He will guide you to the edge and bring you back safely. You’ll learn that the highs and the lows are both great teachers.

While not on the road speaking or trekking in the Canadian Rockies, Clarke is an Adjunct professor at the University of Calgary where he teaches and mentors in the Centre for Advanced Leadership.