Scott Kress has gained great insight into the inner workings of leadership and teams through over 22 years of leading climbing expeditions. He has guided and summitted peaks throughout North America, South America, Africa and the Himalayas including Mount Everest and five other of the seven summits. Scott has designed a dynamic keynote presentation based on his team and leadership lessons while climbing the highest peaks in the world.

Scott Kress has only one goal; to assist teams, leaders, and individuals in reaching their peak performance. This is accomplished through combining the latest team and leadership theory with cutting edge experiential training to create one of the most effective training programs available today. Scott’s team and leadership development programs are custom designed to meet each client’s needs.

Years of experience, two undergraduate degrees and a Masters in Leadership and Training provide Scott with unique qualifications to design and deliver some of the most innovative corporate experiential based training available today.

Scott Kress also teaches Leadership and Organizational Change for the Rotman School of Management, the Odette School of Business, and the University of Edinburgh Executive MBA programs. He has been voted professor two times.

Through his dynamic background of education, training, experience, adventure and leading expeditions throughout the world, Scott Kress can motivate and challenge any group and inspire them to reach their peak performance.

Keynotes and Speaking Topics

• Learning In Thin Air What can you learn from an MBA Professor who climbed Mount Everest… A LOT! You may have seen an Everest speaker in the past, but none with the same story, point of view, or connection with business learning. Scott’s is not just a story about climbing in the mountains; it is a story that provides real world examples of success and failure and how to apply these lessons in a business environment.
• Summiting Mount Everest is a notable accomplishment at any time. But in May of 2008, an Olympics in China brought military blockades, arrests, deportations and chaos to Everest. Scott Kress witnessed firsthand how team-work, the ability to embrace change and leadership were critical in overcoming unexpected obstacles.
• In Scott’s gripping presentation, you will discover how the many skills used in climbing may be applied to summit your own personal mountains in business and in life. Through inspiring personal stories of triumph, challenge, determination and even failure, Scott shows audiences that we are all climbers of our own mountains. By rising to the challenge of change and continuous improvement, he demonstrates how lessons of life in the mountains are directly applicable to any organization’s challenges.
• Conquering Everest Creating a high performance team is your best competitive advantage in today’s ultra-competitive business environment. How well teams work together has a direct connection to employee satisfaction, employee performance, product or service quality, customer satisfaction and ultimately company profitability. The key to achieving high performance as a team is communication. In this interactive session you will have the opportunity to climb along with Scott as he recounts his climb of Mount Everest and you will be challenged to make many of the same decisions climbers need to make on the mountain. You will be provided with tools, models and insight into effective communication and decision making that you will use during this session and a short debrief will examine application in the workplace. This process of creating high performance teams has been proven in business, in an EMBA program and on Mount Everest.
• The Climb of a Life Time Getting to the summit of Mount Everest was the realization of a lifelong dream for Scott Kress, but is almost never happened. Just like so many personal dreams, Scott’s dream to climb Mount Everest had been put on the back burner as life took over. Scott is not an Olympic or sponsored athlete; he is a normal guy with a job, a mortgage and a family just like you. There was just not enough time in the day to get it all done. And then one day, Scott got motivated to live life to the fullest, but unfortunately it took tragedy to do it. In quick successions his Father was diagnosed and died of cancer and then Scott was diagnosed with cancer himself. He could no longer ignore the fragility of life and vowed to make the most of what time he has on this planet. Let Scott’s story be your catalyst to change.

Books and Articles