Jamie Clarke Keynote Speaker

Professional and Olympic-level Performance Coach
Expedition Leader & one of the few alpinists to reach the “Seven Summits”
Adjunct Professor at the University of Calgary

Jamie Clarke's Biography

Jamie Clarke stood on the top of Everest twice — in 1997 and 2010. But failed the first two times. He’s crossed the barren Empty Quarter by camel, learning to trust ancient cultures for survival. He launched and ran a bricks & mortar retail operation for 14 years and was founder and CEO of an e-commerce start-up. And he’s been a sought-after speaker and facilitator for more than 25 years.

Jamie Clarke brings a treasure trove of stories back from the edge of an adventurous life: stories of triumph and heartache, kindness and defeat. When you hear Jamie speak, you’ll get goosebumps. But you’ll also get sore sides from laughter and share tears of compassion.

Storytellers don’t get any closer to the edge of human experience.
Jamie’s upbeat perspectives from the roof of the world to the peaks of business success have made him a favorite with leading companies and pro sports franchises. The Stanley Cup-winning Capitals, Olympic Gold Medal Team Canada, IBM, Kraft, NFL and The Wall Street Journal have learned from his stories of perseverance, leadership and teambuilding.

With boundless energy, gritty humor and palpable passion, Clarke inspires audiences by channeling the lessons of unforgiving wild places to illuminate the challenges organizations and people face every day. Jamie offers deep insight and actionable strategy for success in business, academia — or the most dynamic environment of all: everyday life.

The Map is Not the Terrain: Charting a New Course for Leadership

Jamie Clarke knows a lot about leadership and uncertainty. He has spent his entire adult life embracing the unknown. From his days as a world-renowned adventure leader and elite climber to becoming a successful business builder and professional sports consultant to a Stanley Cup - winning hockey team, Jamie has navigated countless high pressure and challenging landscapes. Even though teams and individuals consistently ignore this certainty, Jamie knows it: Uncertainty leads to indecision. Indecision leads to fear. Fear leads to chaos. Chaos ends in failure. Always.

This program is more than 30 years in the making. It takes you inside the mindset and the leadership qualities that build team cultures that don’t shrink from uncertainty. Instead, they succeed when others fail. What to do when your old map no longer works? These cultures are everything from teams of business professionals, expeditions struggling to survive negative 70 degree blizzards in the death zone of 25,000 feet, or professional sports teams finding their collective way to break through past failures and become champions.

With an infectious sense of humor and palpable, authentic passion, Jamie challenges his audiences to think differently about success, failure, hard work and fear. In his visually stunning and always charismatic and inspiring style, audiences will learn how to:

Adapt to forces outside of one’s control.

Uphold one’s mission despite the unknowns and the lack of perfect information.

Learn from failure quickly and adjust your plans in real-time.

Conquer fear through focus and practice.

Reframe leadership through the lenses of trust, humility, reliance, inclusion and empathy.

Everyone starts at ZERO: Selling and the Mindset Reset

Jamie Clarke gets it. He gets how to grab an audience of sales professionals, pull it in and keep it with him for every word, laugh, metaphor and lesson. With an infectious charisma, relatable humor and a feel-it-in-your-shoes passion, Jamie Clarke challenges sales audiences to think differently about success, drive, failure, hard work and fear. No matter your past successes, be it summiting Everest or setting new sales records, everyone at one point has to start all over again. And prove it again. To start at ZERO. Again.

This captivating program on regrouping and starting over from zero, shares hard-earned insights from his journeys scaling our world’s highest mountains, trekking through its most dangerous places and then creating and managing his own adventure outfitters business. Jamie Clarke is the perfect speaker for sales kick-off events seeking a fresh spark and an actionable blueprint for sharpening risk-taking and mindset. Clarke’s customized presentations deliver powerful take-away lessons on:

Performing your best when it matters most

The shift required to get the grunt work done

Conquering fear through focus

Building a resilient, winning mindset

He helps leaders and organisations build resilience, lead through uncertainty and achieve extraordinary results by sharing lessons learned from some of the world’s toughest environments.
He translates experiences from mountaineering, exploration and entrepreneurship into practical strategies for perseverance, teamwork, leadership and adapting to change under pressure.
He combines the perspective of a two-time Everest summiteer, explorer, entrepreneur and business leader, offering a unique approach to overcoming setbacks, embracing uncertainty and sustaining high performance.
From standing on the summit of Mount Everest to crossing the Empty Quarter by camel and building successful businesses, his remarkable experiences demonstrate the power of determination, courage and continuous learning.
His inspiring keynotes equip audiences with practical tools to embrace challenge, strengthen resilience and develop the mindset needed to succeed in business, leadership and life.

Videos of Jamie Clarke

Jamie Clarke - Sizzle Reel

Jamie Clarke Sizzle Reel

Herc Rentals - Failure isn’t Failure

Jamie Clarke - Leading in the Hard Times

Jamie Clarke - When you Don’t Know (Genesys G-Force)

Articles, Media & Podcasts

Jamie Clarke Helps Canadian Women Win Gold Again

The Squamish Chief

Books by Jamie Clarke

Above All Else

Comments & Testimonials

We've had a number of speakers over the years, but what's blown me away since the summit is how often your name and your messages come up in meetings when we're talking about upcoming opportunities, or bringing on new team members. The gospel of Jamie is alive and well some five months later across our global footprint and I know it will be for years!

Brandt

He is an amazing storyteller and captivated the audience for over an hour.

Donna Erickson Director of Conferences, LIMRA

It was a great show! We have had nothing but outstanding comments about Jamie’s presentation!! And the fact that he became so involved with the event went above and beyond in my book. Thank you for the recommendation and getting him involved in our event.

John Deere

Jamie Clarke is without a doubt one of the best motivational speakers I have ever witnessed. He captivated our professional services audience of over 4,000 people. Jamie made us laugh, cry, and adeptly integrated an understanding of our business into his story of adventure and brought the house down. He is the best!

Peter Kilman Director, U.S. Communications, Deloitte Services LP

He was fantastic! Several folks said that he was the best keynote that they had ever heard, which is saying a lot!

Neo Genomics