Your Summit Awaits with Jamie Clarke.

Your Summit Awaits with Jamie Clarke, Video, 2005, Star Thrower Distribution Corp., $695.

Support: leader guide, participant workbook, pocket review cards, PowerPoint slides.

The desire for success propels individuals, organizations, and even countries forward in one way or another. But as important as they are, schools don't teach success skills. You don't see Success 101 on college transcripts or on the covers of elementary school books that children bring home. For adults, there are plenty of seminars, speakers, and self-help books claiming to reveal how you can succeed, but they frequently offer nothing more than gimmicks and common sense.

In an organization, success is not usually even considered until the lack of it cannot be explained. A company has all of the raw materials and brain power to make a superior product, yet they fall short; an individual is educated, bright, and healthy yet is not doing as well as he or she may appear to be capable of--these are the situations when we start to consider the meat and bone of success, when we start to ask important questions about defining and achieve it.

Seven concepts for achieving success

The DVD Your Summit Awaits, produced by Star Thrower, is a quick study of seven concepts that can help individuals maintain perspective while seeking success:

* Selecting goals you are passionate about

* Confronting when necessary

* Preventing obsession with goal achievement from clouding your judgment

* Keeping promises

* Correctly identifying and facing fears

* Thanking those that help you to the top

* Holding a positive image of the future

Though the video uses a mountain climbing team trying to reach the summit of Mount Everest as an example, it expresses how the seven concepts relate to pursuing any lofty goal, be it building a new organization, developing a new product, achieving greatness in your profession, or improving personal relations.

The video has high-quality footage of Mt. Everest and other mountains. The narrator, Jamie Clark, tells his story of being part of the climbing team. Not only does he talk about the final successful climb, but he also discusses the team's two unsuccessful attempts and what failure taught them about success.

A leader guide, participant workbook, 10-slide PowerPoint presentation, and pocket review cards accompany the DVD.

Pros and cons 

Your Summit Awaits has a lot of pros going for it:

* The video is well produced, with beautiful scenery that changes frequently to inspire and help keep the visual interest of the viewers, and Clark has a skillful delivery.

* The message is not preachy or repetitive.

* The lessons learned from the mountain climbing experience can easily be applied to almost any goal where success may not be easily attained.

* The lessons from the two unsuccessful attempts to reach the summit of Everest apply to dealing with and learning from failure in any endeavor.

* The message is relevant to individuals or groups where both goal achievement and balance are important.

The product has a few cons:

* The program may not be deep enough to stand on its own but might better be used as part of a larger program such as team-building or leadership development training.

* Though the video is not long (only 21 minutes), I got a little tired of the single voice. Some variety would have been welcome.

* The PowerPoint presentation needs to be fleshed out, although it may have been designed to be more of an outline (with illustrative quotes) so that the presenter can embellish it--which trainers do most of the time anyway.

Recommendation

Your Summit Awaits is more then just a motivational video; in fact, you will probably find this program too didactic to serve strictly as a motivational piece. And using the program as stand-alone training may risk missing its real power: As an addition to training related to goal achievement, team building, or leadership, it can be a very worthwhile investment.

Review by Beth Summers

Product Ratings

Your Summit Awaits with Jamie Clarke

Holds user interest  ***
Acting/presenting    *** 1/2
Diversity            *
Production quality   *** 1/2
Value of Content     ***
Instructional Value  ***
Value for the money  ***
Overall rating       ***