One winter morning in 2008, Scott Lippman was driving to Taos Ski Valley in New Mexico. He should have been giddy—a storm had dropped fresh powder overnight. But he wasn’t. “On every run, I knew I’d have to stop halfway down and unbuckle my boots, because I couldn’t feel my toes,” says Lippman, 48, an inventory liquidator who lives in Santa Fe and often skis with his wife and 16-yearold twin daughters. He’d recently dropped $500 for footbed heaters and custom insoles and hired a professional fitter to stretch and grind his plastic shells into submission. None of it made the boots tolerable. After the trip, he considered quitting the sport for good. But first he did some Googling. Lippman came across an online review of a boot, invented by a company called Apex Ski Boots, that drastically minimized the shell. The Apex’s structural integrity comes from a scaffolding-like frame that surrounds a plush, detachable inner boot with a waterproof exterior and sneaker-style sole. Three turns into his next downhill run, Lippman says, “I was immediately sold.” No pain. No numbness. Now his wife and daughters ski in them, too. There hasn’t been a market-research study to assess how many skiers hate their standard-issue boots. But if anecdotal evidence is any measure, it’s surely all of them—including, at one point, Apex Chief Executive Officer Kevin Tice. A native of Colorado and former Wall Street banker, Tice, 54, recalls a particular afternoon in 1983 at Loveland Ski Area, west of Denver, when he ducked into the lodge because his right foot was stinging. “I took off my boot, and my big toe was bleeding, and the nail was ready to fall off,” he says. On his next lift ride, he sat with a ski patroller. “Don’t worry about the pain,” the patroller said. “All good skiers lose their big toenails.” The absurdity of the comment stuck with Tice: “I thought it was crazy. Here was this product that mangles your foot, and people had just accepted it.”

Questions for Discussion 

1. Was the decision Apex co-founders Roger Neiley and Denny Hanson made to try to develop a new kind of ski boot a programmed or nonprogrammed decision? 

2. To what extent was this decision characterized by risk and uncertainty? 

3. How did they recognize the need to make the decision? 

4. Why are some dealers reluctant to deal in Apex Ski Boots?