People

PHOTOGRAPH BY JEFF REINKING

Her Personal Everest

Erin Simonson, MBA ’94

IT READS LIKE a romance novel: “Leaving her successful investment banking career behind, Erin journeys to Mt. Kilimanjaro to rekindle her passion for climbing and during the ascent meets Eric, the professional mountaineer who will one day become her husband.”

For Erin Copland Simonson, MBA ’94, this is no fairy tale. She is now head of finance and business development for International Mountain Guides, a company founded by her husband. “I married my job,” Simonson quips. “For us, it was a strategic merger.”

She immediately saw the potential to grow the company into one of the world’s premier commercial climbing companies, managing treks from Everest to Aconcagua. Recently, she put inspiration and her MBA to work by organizing the first-ever U.S. women’s team to ascend Mt. Everest. With a team member, she recruited Ford Motor Co. to underwrite the expedition.

Collaborating with the agency J. Walter Thompson, Simonson promoted five amateur climbers to the media and secured feature coverage, including an on-mountain camera crew from Discovery.com and appearances on NBC’s Today. Weather turned the team away at the summit on May 18, but Simonson was thrilled they made the safe decision to turn back from 28,000 feet.

Though she has organized high-profile climbs in the past, “undertaking this effort was my own personal Everest,” she says, noting that she has a toddler now. In 1999, she orchestrated a research expedition that successfully located the body of one of the first known Western climbers, George Mallory, who disappeared in 1924.

Since her Kilimanjaro climb in 1995, Simonson’s life has been an adventure, and she is a strong believer in taking entrepreneurial risks in areas of personal passion. She readily admits she “can’t imagine putting stockings on again every morning.” Her plan is to continue to organize climbs and grow the business. She highlights an upcoming trek for amateur climbers to Mt. Kilimanjaro—ready for some adventure in your life?

—AMY PAULSEN, MBA ’93

Journey to Afghanistan

Nancy Glaser, MBA ’85

IT'S NOT EVERY New Year’s resolution that changes the world. Nancy Glaser’s last one was to take meaningful action in response to the events of September 2001. Within days, she found herself in the company of people from the Afghan Center of Fremont and the Foundation for Global Community of Palo Alto considering how to rebuild war-ravaged Afghanistan. By May, with funding from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Glaser, MBA ’85, and six other volunteers were in Kabul, formulating strategies for economic renewal with government officials, returning refugees, and representatives of nongovernmental organizations.

“The first thing we saw was the destruction, especially poignant in the company of my Afghan American colleagues who had not been to their country for years and were kissing the ground in front of bombed-out sites where their homes used to be,” Glaser says. “But even with all the devastation, there was so much hope. Turning aid containers into shops, people had already set up a bazaar on a dry riverbed.” She described women swathed in burqas and speaking perfect English (learned in refugee camps in Pakistan). Eager to be working, they presented her with resumes. She also saw school classes meeting under trees that included girls for the first time in six years.

Glaser’s background in retail, venture capital, and venture philanthropy bridges the for-profit and not-for-profit worlds. She says she loves translating business development ideas into different cultures. She spent the summer after graduation in Thailand on a SMIF (Stanford Management Internship Fund) grant, and she has organized startups in Russia and Poland. She is now chair of the GSB’s Alumni Consulting Team program, which links alumni volunteers with public-benefit organizations.

Her 2002 New Year’s resolution will change many lives, for the result of her three-week Kabul trip is the Arise Project, which trains Afghans for employment so they may quickly be self-supporting and contribute to rebuilding the civil economy. (See www.ariseproject.org.)

—LISA EUNSON