Featured Alumnus: Alexander Martin ’04

For most people, a day at the office means sitting at a desk and a commute means driving a dozen miles on the highway. That is not the case for this month’s featured alumnus Alexander Martin ’04. For Martin, his office might be the snow-capped peak of an Alaskan mountain while his commute could be a canoe trip across a continent, and his product is the next generation of leaders and difference-makers. 

Martin says his passion for this type of work began in part during his time at Avon Old Farms. “Basically that whole stretch, starting when I arrived at Avon, was about leadership and teamwork,” he shares. While at Avon, Martin was a record-setting varsity swimmer and was a leader of the Avon Record, Hippocrene, and Snow Riders Club. He remembers captaining the fourths soccer team to an undefeated season and how even that experience had a profound impact. “Being looked to as a leader at that early age was huge.”

He matriculated at Bates College where he majored in history with a focus on grand strategy and was heavily involved with the Outing Club. Although he finished his undergrad degree at the height of the 2008 recession, he immediately began training for a job that he continues to work on to this day. 

Shortly after graduating from college, Martin found himself in the remote Canadian Arctic as part of his training to work for the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), a nonprofit global wilderness school specializing in teaching leadership skills. He spent weeks mountaineering and canoeing his way through the Arctic and was eventually offered a job with NOLS. For the next 10 years, as a member of the NOLS Faculty, Martin led a variety of wilderness expeditions in different environments around the world. His students ranged from Google executives to high-ranking military officers to top MBA students, always with the goal of developing their leadership and teamwork capacity. Often, this meant being off the grid for months at a time. “That was always hard physically, mentally, and emotionally.”

As was the case with his first leadership roles, Martin says he can attribute his first teaching experience to his time at Avon—specifically to his sophomore year. “I had written a paper on it the year before, and the next year Mr. Narsipur invited me back to teach about Roman military strategies. I was 15. That was the first time I ever taught, the first time I was trusted to teach young minds. That was very meaningful for me.”

Martin enrolled at Harvard University for graduate school where he studied leadership development and organizational behavior. While he still serves as Senior Faculty at NOLS, he splits his time serving as a Linkage/SHRM consultant, and as the Americas Hub Lead for TrailHaven, a McKinsey spin-off that does retreat-based executive development and strategy. As a consultant, facilitator, and executive coach, he has worked with NASA mission-crews, fighter squadrons, top-five MBA students, and leaders across the FAANG group, as well as top-five companies in the automotive, brokerage, financial services, insurance, and healthcare industries. 

In 2014, he started Treeline Development, a company that provides transformational leadership development experiences. Martin says this has become his full-time focus in the last few years, but he still manages to find time for his other work. “This past summer I led an expedition on an Alaskan mountain. The summer before that I worked with the upcoming NASA Mars mission. I do that for a few weeks, then I come back to a Boston board room for a few weeks. It’s a really rewarding mix. Now I’m able to take on the projects that are meaningful for the world, and with groups that are working to solve important issues.”

Since graduating from Avon, Martin’s adventures have not been limited to when he’s on the clock. During his early years with NOLS, he spent his off-work time embarking on expeditions of his own, which have resulted in a piecemeal circumnavigation of the planet. It began with a solo canoe trip from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine. This was followed by a canoe trip from Paris to Istanbul. From there he biked to Kazakhstan and finished it off with a cross-country ski traverse of Siberia. “It was obviously a physical challenge, but it was an amazing experience. To move through different landscapes, experiencing natural beauty but also seeing different ways of living, there’s a million stories from that trip.”

Now, with an 18-month-old in tow, Martin’s vacations aren’t as intense, but are just as memorable. He says he wouldn’t mind taking a trip back to Avon at some point in the future. “I remember at Avon, there was a sort of general moral reasoning instilled in us that I hadn’t experienced until then, and has since been hugely influential on my life. It’s part of the cultural fabric there.”