Stace Lindsay
Stace Lindsay is Executive Vice President for Leadership at the Aspen Institute, where he guides leadership fellowships and serves as a senior moderator for leadership seminars. A strategic advisor, teacher, and entrepreneur, he has more than 30 years of experience working with leaders in business, government, and civil society.
Edward Jones and CoBank Tie Leadership to Long-Term Community Stewardship
At Aspen Ideas: Economy in Tulsa, Edward Jones managing partner Penny Pennington and CoBank CEO Tom Halverson argued that long-term leadership is a form of stewardship: executives must care for the institutions they inherit while strengthening the communities and opportunities they leave to future generations. Moderated by Aspen Institute leadership executive Stace Lindsay, the discussion also addressed the risks that could narrow those opportunities, including the US fiscal outlook and the transfer of wealth between generations.
Leadership’s Long-Term Test Is What Communities Can Keep
At Aspen Ideas: Economy in Tulsa, Edward Jones managing partner Penny Pennington and CoBank CEO Tom Halverson offered different accounts of what leaders owe the next generation. Pennington argued that ownership, financial education and sustained local investment can help people build lasting opportunity; Halverson pointed to cooperative institutions and warned that fiscal and economic pressures could narrow future generations’ choices. Both measured leadership by whether the institutions and conditions leaders leave behind can keep working after they are gone.
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.