Poles apart: the MBA on top of the world

Adam Levy's time at INSEAD helped to prepare him for a trek to the North Pole, says Hilary Wilce

Everyone knows that a good MBA can take you places. But the North Pole? Absolutely, says Adam Levy, 31, who has just arrived home having trekked there. Before he left for the Arctic, he explained how his business degree prepared him for life on the shifting ice.

The former pharmaceuticals executive believes it is thanks to the skills and contacts he gained at the French business school, INSEAD, that he has been able to fulfil his dream of becoming a polar explorer.

Last month he and two companions left for an expedition which involved a trek of 150km to the North Pole, walking for up to 10 hours a day, dragging sledges weighing 100kg, in temperatures as low as -60 degrees centigrade. Their route took them over broken pressure ridges and across crevices – traversing a rubble field, climbing over 12-foot blocks of ice and shoeing away the odd polar bear – needing an almost robotic endurance to keep going. "There is not one element of this trip that could be considered pleasant," he said, just before leaving.

But putting the expedition together was a bigger challenge. "We started last autumn and it was the most intense commercial experience of my life. In many ways it was like the kind of brainstorming exercise you do at INSEAD. We had to sit down and think: now, who will be interested in the media angle? Who can we get on board for the technology? Who wants to give us money?

"In fact it was exactly like building a small business – and it gave me a huge insight into what it takes to be a chief executive. We had to have a business plan, do our accounts, deal with our contractors, work out agreements with our sponsors and think about the projects we were trying to run. But because I'd been to INSEAD, I had the knowledge that I could do it. I knew that I had the intellectual tool set. I knew I had the attitude, and I had the structure. And I also had the incredible INSEAD network. I knew I could call up people, all over the world, and they wouldn't necessarily be the right people, but they would be able to point me in the direction of people who were."

Belonging to this exclusive club proved invaluable in a business climate where most companies were more interested in tightening belts than signing sponsorship agreements. Seventeen calls to Sony, he remembers, yielded precisely nothing. "We learnt very quickly that there are no free lunches out there." Even so, the team eventually drummed up support from Dabbs.com, the online IT provider, Energiser, the battery people, and Iridium, the satellite phone company, among others.

Levy decided to do an MBA four years ago, after graduating in natural sciences from Cambridge and working for a small Cambridge biotech company. He applied to INSEAD in order to move on from doing lab-based science into fast-track management. But when he got there, the culture was a revelation. "I was used to being around smart people, but I hadn't known what it was like to be in such a pool where everyone was so switched-on and bubbling with intellectual interest. A lot of what you do there is obviously commercial and hard-edged, but an awful lot is soft-edged as well. What you're trying to do is to understand how you fit into the work process, and what sort of environment you want to be in."

The international atmosphere gives you a global vision, he says, while covering the whole gamut of business skills, and sharing experiences with people from wildly different backgrounds, teaches you to recognise "the way everything is connected". As for people skills, holding together a small polar expedition team is, he suspects, nothing compared to having to run an INSEAD project with "an Israeli lawyer, a Russian diplomat, a Czech aerospace engineer and a Swiss banker".

After INSEAD, Levy plunged back into corporate life, negotiating US licensing deals for a leading biotech company. "I had the snappy suit, flew business class and closed million dollar deals." But after a couple of years he realised it wasn't where he wanted to be and started to look around for the next challenge.

Inevitably his thoughts turned northwards. Years ago, in his first job, he had been the gym partner of a former Harvard MBA who was off on an expedition to the North Pole. "I suppose it was him who partly pushed me into doing an MBA, and him who got me thinking about going to the Pole."

Last year he made his first trip to the North Pole – on, he says dismissively, the sort of adventure break that is actually little more than a challenging package holiday. But the world got under his skin. "They call it the polar virus. It's such a privilege to be in this vast Arctic area, where there's 24-hour daylight, and where you've got all the incredible blues and greens of the ice. Nothing but the sound of your breath, and your feet on the snow. And then, when you finally get to stand on the North Pole, you've got the whole world south of you."

So he teamed up with Geoff Somers, an experienced polar explorer, and David Burckett-St. Laurent, a London medical student taking a break from his studies in a bid to become the youngest explorer to reach the Pole, and put together this innovative trek, pioneering new video stream communications and raising money for the children's charity, Children Nationwide. But, he said, the management training would still be there with him. "I'm taking the INSEAD book with me. I'll be calling people up from the ice, saying, 'Give me your money!'"