Stace Lindsay
Executive Vice President for Leadership at the Aspen Institute, Henry Crown Fellow, and Senior Moderator. He has spent more than 20 years designing and facilitating global leadership fellowships and has led over 150 Aspen Institute leadership seminars worldwide.
Purpose-Driven Leadership Begins Before Strategy Is Clear
At the Resnick Aspen Action Forum, 2026 McNulty Prize winners Anna Novosad, Rudy Espinoza and Tom McDougall argued that purpose-driven leadership begins before certainty, funding or a finished strategy is in place. Novosad described building savED from an initial effort to assess damaged schools in Ukraine; Espinoza framed advocacy as a decision to take a side alongside people excluded from capital; and McDougall called for confronting the environmental and human costs omitted from market prices. Their shared case was that sustaining such commitments requires care for one’s own capacity and collaboration with others—not faith that a rescuer will arrive.
The Aspen Institute Frames Leadership as Dialogue Across Difference
In a 75th-anniversary institutional statement, the Aspen Institute presents leadership as a discipline of listening, convening and acting across difference. Its executives argue that progress begins with people: dialogue builds common ground and trust, and that trust can be turned toward work on economic opportunity, energy and climate challenges, institutions and rising generations. President and chief executive Dan Porterfield closes the case as an invitation to “ignite human potential” and create new possibilities for a better world.