What is Higher Ambition Leadership?
Higher Ambition Leadership is a commitment to creating exceptional organizational performance while making a lasting, positive difference for people and society.
The "higher" in Higher Ambition reflects the aspiration to create impact beyond individual success and financial results—strengthening teams, organizations, industries, and communities. Rather than treating purpose and performance as competing priorities, Higher Ambition leaders recognize that they are mutually reinforcing. They lead with simultaneous attention to people, purpose, and performance.
This path calls leaders to
Commit to continuous growth and development
Pursue excellence across a broad definition of performance
Build trust, collaboration, and shared leadership
Connect personal leadership with organizational purpose
Higher Ambition Leadership is demanding, but it enables organizations to achieve exceptional results while creating lasting value for the people and systems they serve.
Our Approach
Leadership development is most powerful when it is grounded in real work, informed by research, and enriched by the experience of peers. Our programs bring leaders together to address the challenges they face today through facilitated dialogue, practical application, reflection, and shared learning. Participants leave with new ideas, stronger relationships, and the confidence to put learning into practice.
Everything we do is grounded in the principles of Higher Ambition Leadership.
People
Leadership decisions shape the lives of employees, customers, partners, and communities. We help leaders build trust, develop others, and create organizations where people can do their best work.
Purpose
Purpose provides direction for strategy, decision-making, and culture. We help leaders align their organizations around a shared sense of purpose while connecting it to their own values and leadership.
Performance
Performance means more than financial results. Enduring success also depends on healthy cultures, innovation, adaptability, strong teams, and outcomes that advance an organization's purpose.
Our Mission
The Higher Ambition Leadership Alliance exists to help leaders create lasting, positive impact through their organizations and the broader systems they influence.
We advance the principles and practice of Higher Ambition Leadership through leadership development, peer learning, applied research, and cross-sector collaboration. By helping leaders invest simultaneously in people, purpose, and performance, we strengthen organizations while building the relationships and capabilities needed to address complex challenges that no single organization can solve alone.
Our Founding Story
The Higher Ambition Leadership Alliance began with a simple observation.
The strongest organizations weren't making tradeoffs between purpose and performance. They were integrating them.
Seeking to understand what distinguished these organizations, Nathaniel Foote, Russ Eisenstat, and Michael Beer (and their European colleagues Tobias Fredberg and Flemming Norrgren) interviewed CEOs across sectors. They found that the most effective leaders viewed their organizations as both economic and social institutions, building cultures where purpose, people, and performance reinforced one another.
Those insights became the book Higher Ambition: How Great Leaders Create Economic and Social Value.
But the book wasn't the end of the story.
At the launch event, many of the CEOs said the most valuable part of the project hadn't been seeing their ideas in print—it had been meeting one another. They had discovered a community of peers facing similar leadership challenges and asking many of the same questions.
That insight gave rise to the Higher Ambition Leadership Alliance: a nonprofit community where leaders learn from one another while advancing a more integrated approach to leadership.
Today, the Alliance brings together leaders through leadership programs, peer networks, research, and cross-sector initiatives—all grounded in the same founding belief:
Organizations are strongest when people, purpose, and performance are pursued together.
