Speaker Bio
For more than 25 years, Jamie Clarke has worked 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.
Lots of speakers talk about leadership and building, innovating and disrupting, but precious few have really done it from the ground up. As a successful entrepreneur in an outdoor gear and apparel company for more than 14 years, Jamie learned many business lessons the only way possible – by being in the trenches. He led a 50 person team as the CEO of both a brick and mortar retail company and then successfully pivoted to an e-commerce enterprise.
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.
These entrepreneurial experiences deeply inform his presentations and allow Jamie to speak to business audiences with authority. In short, “He gets it.”
From C-suite leaders running 10-billion-dollar companies to boots-on-the-ground salespeople trying to hit quota, from highly technical professionals like engineers, to the hard-working blue-collar laborers who make things work, Jamie always connects.
His high-energy programs take 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.
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Speaker Topics
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.
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
Testimonials
What Jamie Clarke learned on Everest helped the Caps win on the ice.
I’m not sure I have the words to express how remarkably well received Jamie‘s talk was by the whole audience. He personalized and tailored his speech while telling his own authentic story. He had people laughing. He had people crying. And, he had people talking about him non stop after he was off the stage. And when I mean people, I mean 2,000 district managers all the way to our CEO and COO – both of whom were shedding a tear. I cannot say enough good things about his professional and authentic approach to just being truly who he is: a remarkable storyteller. I don’t anticipate this is the last time Starbucks will work with Jamie and I am happy to recommend or endorse him at any capacity. (Starbucks has already booked Jamie twice more since June 2025).
The feedback from our members has been nothing short of glowing—they were inspired, moved, and thoroughly engaged by your insights, humor, and the powerful life lessons you shared. You didn’t just speak to the room—you connected with every person in it. We were especially grateful for your generosity in staying afterward to connect with attendees and immerse yourself in the rest of the day’s experience. That personal touch meant so much to everyone.
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.” (Jamie was booked for their annual sales kick-off events in 2023 AND in 2025.)
Jamie Clarke blew everyone away. He was incredible. He took everything we said during our pre-call and wove it through his presentation and story. It was unbelievable how many tie-ins he made that reinforced our overall message every step of the way. He was worth twice his price.
To say he inspired us would be an understatement—Jamie made us laugh, cry, and reflect deeply on what it means to be better humans. Thank you, Jamie, for sharing your remarkable journey with us. You left us with not just goosebumps, but a renewed commitment to excellence and compassion.
Best speaker we have ever had after four years of doing this event. He spent the time getting to know everyone at the event and catered his messages accordingly. Jamie was amazing!
You’re the best, Jamie. Once again you nailed it! I’m always amazed at your ability to hear something 30 minutes earlier and seamlessly weave it into your presentation. Job well done and the pleasure was all mine.” (Booked Jamie for their kick-off sales meeting in BOTH 2023 and again in 2024 and Jamie did a different talk for each event)
He was fantastic! Several folks said that he was the best keynote that they had ever heard, which is saying a lot!
You beautifully and delicately wove in the messages that our leadership had been delivering over the prior days, and we appreciate the time you took to listen in on these Paul Hastings sessions. Thanks for sharing your stories and tying your learnings to the practice of law and the non-linear paths that our careers may take. I particularly appreciated your reference to the two levers of attitude and effort. . .which is hugely important in most professions, but particularly relevant in law.
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