Full Biography

Jamie Clarke works with elite teams who win: Olympic teams, NHL teams, sales teams, leadership teams, and start-up teams. What connects them all is pressure.  With his own hard-won philosophy of decision-making in extremes— and a storytelling technique that can take you from laughter to tears in minutes — Jamie recharges audiences with fresh perspectives on success and failure, and risk vs. reward.

Creative, humorous, passionate, and on-point, Jamie walks you through his successful planning process for expeditions and business. Essential tips on risk assessment. Check. How to listen for cracks in the ice — and your team. Check. Weathering storms, literal and metaphorical. Check and check.

Through heart-stopping challenges, Jamie has reached the peak of his profession as climber and expedition leader.  After failing twice, Jamie regrouped to reach Mt. Everest’s death-zone summit, twice. He’s trekked 1,000 miles across the most inhospitable desert on the planet and is one of the few alpinists to reach the “Seven Summits” – the highest peak on each continent. As a successful entrepreneur, Jamie learned many business lessons the hard way as the CEO of an e-commerce retail start-up.

His high-energy programs takes you to dangerous places, both real and imagined. He’ll guide you to the edge and bring you back safely. You’ll learn that the highs and the lows are both great teachers.

While not on the road speaking or trekking in the Canadian Rockies, Jamie is an Adjunct professor at the University of Calgary where he teaches and mentors in the Centre for Advanced Leadership.

Speech Topics

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

The Testimonials: