Business hero: Nando Parrado

14th
OCT

Posted by Michael under Leadership

There are few people in the world whose lives are utterly changed by a single experience. Nelson Mandela in prison, 33 Chilean miners rescued after 69 days trapped underground and, for me, Nando Parrado.

His is one of the most courageous and determined lives of the modern age, showing astonishing leadership, decision-making, supreme endurance and survival – all based on team work created under almost impossible circumstances. Nando Parrado makes other business leaders pale in comparison.

As no more than a boy, playing rugby for his college, he flew to Chile for an international friendly. Travelling back by plane with his family and many of his friends, he was involved in a horrific crash.

Survivor to business leader

Stranded high in the Andes, his mother and little sister killed by the plane crash, he and fifteen others survived. With one companion, Nando Parrado walked out of the mountains to get help for the rest of the survivors and they all went on to resume their lives after being lost for 72 days. The things he had to do to stay alive were beyond the understanding of most of us: eating the flesh of those who had died, trekking through pathless snowy mountains for eleven days, coming home to find his family had cleared his room and given away his belongings, and that the family business was on the brink of collapse because his mother, who died in the crash, had been key to its success.

Values for life and business

It takes incredible insight, discipline and self-belief to recover from such horrific situations, let alone to build a wonderful life, a secure family and successful businesses. But that’s what Nando Parrado did.

Now he’s a motivational speaker and business leader, president of the family company and the founder of two TV media production companies and a cable one. Parrado says that three values helped him not just survive but thrive: family, confidence and friendship.

Or as he puts it, ‘after having experienced a human situation where our limits of physical and mental suffering were constantly reached and even exceeded, I have come to understand that family is what made us survive.’ In addition he now finds confidence easy, ‘life is simpler than it looks’ is his mantra, along with ‘eat every sandwich, kiss every girl’ an allusion to the things that the young survivors said to themselves they wished they had done, and would always do, when they got back to safety.

Making decisions is straightforward he says, because the worst than can happen is that he will be wrong. After what he lived through, that’s nothing to worry about.

And friendship? He still lives in the same district in Montevideo he grew up in, as do fifteen of the sixteen survivors. None of them had counselling and none of them seem to have struggled to cope with their experiences. Parrado says that friendship was his inspiration to trek out, with one friend at his side and others relying on them for any hope of survival.

Now his view of the world is straightforward, ‘Sometimes I ask myself why people need to experience extreme situations to understand the real values of life. These values are so clear and so near us, yet we rush by them looking for the “important” things. Eat every sandwich, kiss every girl. Life is simpler than it looks.’

Andes photograph by here everywhere

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