An Entrepreneur and Explorer to Lead Outward Bound

Inspired by the teachings of Outward Bound USA, a nonprofit organization that was a pioneer in wilderness education, Richard Bangs started a for-profit business leading people on river-rafting trips. Now, 28 years later, the entrepreneur and international explorer who founded a company that has become a leader in the latest adventure-travel boom is taking the helm of Outward Bound as the group’s president.

“I spent a whole career preparing for this position,” says Mr. Bangs, who says that he has long been motivated by Outward Bound’s philosophy that wilderness exploration can lead to personal growth.

Outward Bound USA, in Garrison, N.Y., is the umbrella organization for five independently operated Outward Bound schools and several other programs, which together run about 700 wilderness courses for teenagers and adults.

The organization got its start in England 60 years ago as a program to toughen up young sailors. Today, in the United States, about 34,000 people each year take Outward Bound courses that are designed to teach them outdoor skills and activities, such as rock climbing, and to build self-esteem and self-reliance. Another 36,000 youngsters are involved in an Outward Bound program called Expeditionary Learning.

On a budget of about $10-million a year, Outward Bound USA runs the Expeditionary Learning program, awards scholarships, promotes and markets the Outward Bound name, trains instructors, and provides other assistance to Outward Bound’s schools and programs.

For more than a decade, Outward Bound has faced increased competition from a growing number of for-profit and nonprofit travel and wilderness programs, and waning interest among young people in its personal-growth message. It has also lost ground in the corporate market as more company spending for executives to go on wilderness expeditions has been captured by programs that provide sessions tailored to the companies’ business needs.

Mr. Bangs, 50, leaves for Outward Bound from Expedia, a Microsoft spinoff that operates an online travel service. He has been Expedia’s editor at large, spokesman, and strategist.

An adventurer himself, Mr. Bangs has led the first trips to navigate 35 rivers around the world, including the upper Yangtze in China. He has written 13 books, including his latest, The Lost River: A Memoir of Life, Death, and Transformation on Wild Water, published in 1999, which won awards for both outdoor and travel literature.

He began his career in the travel industry at 19, working summers as a river guide in Arizona. A few years later, he started Sobek Expeditions, a river-guiding business named for an ancient Egyptian crocodile-headed god worshiped along the Nile. In 1991, the company merged with another travel business, and it is now called Mountain Travel Sobek.

In an interview, Mr. Bangs talked about his background and new job.

What lessons from business will you bring to Outward Bound?

I have served on a number of nonprofit boards, so I have a sense of the pace and the process that often takes place in nonprofits. It’s much more considered, sometimes at the detriment of efficiency and accomplishing goals. I’m hoping that after 28 years as an entrepreneur that I can bring some business sensibilities and methodologies and perhaps discipline and nimbleness to a nonprofit such as Outward Bound, and hopefully allow it to see things in a different way and move with a little bit more alacrity and help it achieve its goals in a broader and more profound way.

Some people say that Outward Bound has not kept pace with the times or its competitors. What’s your view?

Outward Bound is the pioneer in a lot of different things. But it has competitors, and those competitors have tweaked the Outward Bound idea, and marketed it differently, and, perhaps, they market it better. But Outward Bound is still a terrific, terrific brand, and the organization has an opportunity to bring its brand back to the height of resonance that it enjoyed in the 80’s. If we market, or, better, communicate that Outward Bound has this extraordinary heritage and legacy, and that by joining, you can be a part of the genuine article, we can attract more people and a different set of people, and allow Outward Bound to continue to pioneer.

You founded a company that could be viewed as a competitor with Outward Bound. How do you handle that?

It’s a good thing. As a company that looked at some of the principles of Outward Bound, was heavily influenced by Outward Bound, and by creating something that in some ways did better than Outward Bound, I can take the lessons I learned and take them back to Outward Bound and perhaps give it a little bit more spark and fire and invigoration, and extract the good things that I know and inject them into Outward Bound.

Is there any direct conflict of interest?

I still hold stock in Mountain Travel Sobek. I’m still on the board. I’m one of the four owners. But, no, it’s not a conflict, and in fact I will be working hard to find ways for a lot of my contacts, including at Mountain Travel Sobek, to work together with Outward Bound. There are multiple ways there might be alliances.

What’s your favorite travel destination?

The wilderness. The deeper into the wilderness, the better. Wilderness is somewhat of a state of mind. Wilderness is cutting the umbilical cord, being on your own, your own resources, your own mind, your own body, your own spirit, and that can happen in a powerful way as much in Colorado as it can in the Andes.

Why is it important for a nonprofit group to offer that experience?

Outward Bound has put strong emphasis on the educational component and that has been its foremost mission — to teach teenagers, adjudicated youth, or middle managers, or anybody who is open to learning about himself and the world in a different way. Sure, Mountain Travel Sobek educates as well, but it’s almost by default. It’s not the primary proposition that it sells.

What do you think will make you an effective fund raiser for Outward Bound?

Marketing is a form of fund raising, and I’ve certainly done a lot of that over the years. Growing a company from scratch, there is a lot of fund raising, but it’s not called that.

What do you consider your greatest professional accomplishment?

I would not say just a single greatest accomplishment. My life has been a process of pioneering, of doing things that nobody had done before and seeing things in a different way and making things happen that had not occurred before. I was at the dawn of the whole adventure-travel phenomenon, and I was a chief architect of bringing it into the consciousness of the country and the world, and I feel very proud to have taken something that was good for the traveler and good for the world and making it something that touches, now, many millions of people, as Outward Bound has done.

ABOUT RICHARD BANGS, OUTWARD BOUND’S NEW LEADER

Education: Earned a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University and a master’s in journalism at the University of Southern California. Pursued a doctoral degree in filmmaking, but didn’t finish because of demands from his river-trip business, which he founded the year he took off between college and graduate school.

Charities that he has recently supported financially: Electronic Literature Organization, Puget Sound Environmental Learning Center, Sierra Club

Personal life: Married and has a 6-year-old son