Parallel Peaks: Business Insights While Climbing
the World’s Highest Mountains

By John McQuaig
HRD Press: 2007

When you climb a mountain, your goal is clear. You can see the summit, you can picture yourself standing way up there on top—exhausted maybe, but exhilarated, proud and awestruck.

In business, the goal frequently isn’t so clear. Owners, employees, bankers, advisors and investors can find themselves climbing toward what they assume is a business’s summit… but instead end up scaling different peaks.

Now a new book, Parallel Peaks: Business Insights While Climbing the World’s Highest Mountains, by John McQuaig, CMC, CPA—entrepreneur, consultant, banker, organic farmer and veteran mountaineer—reveals secrets to building a successful business, secrets based on unique insights that came to the author while working his way upwards toward many of the world’s loftiest natural summits.

Through hair-raising, inspirational, and sometimes humorous stories drawn from his own mountaineering adventures, John applies mountaineering principles to building a successful business or managing a successful department and staff. He explains, “I have come to appreciate the relevance of preparing for a major mountain climb to the preparations required to succeed in business. There are many parallels between climbing to the summit of both and tackling the peaks, chasms, glaciers and slippery slopes of figurative and literal mountaintops.”

To get to the top in either field, you need that clear goal (envisioned summit) and a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis of your team members. And you need an experienced guide, too. Think Sir Edmund Hillary could have scaled Mount Everest without Tenzig Norgay? Unlikely.

Author John McQuaig has lived what he preaches, both on the world’s highest peaks and as an entrepreneur since the day he began mowing lawns back in grade school. He followed that by starting and running a painting business as a high-schooler. At 23, he founded his own CPA and consulting firm, McQuaig & Welk, PLLC (www.mcqw.com), which still thrives.

“Owning a business has inherent dangers that most of the workforce prefers to avoid, but that just gets the adrenaline pumping in the true entrepreneur,” he says.

The founder of North Cascades National Bank, a $300 million institution with more than 120 employees, and its Chairman of the Board, he’s also an organic farmer who grows apples and nectarines on 25 acres in Washington state. This Certified Management Consultant also consults with companies on how to establish their “vision paths” and advance their strategic plans toward high peaks of achievement.

As for his actual mountaineering feats, John has made it to the summits of many mountains including Mount Rainier, Kala Pattar, Mount St. Helens, Orizaba and Kilimanjaro.

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