This post is taken from The Necessity of Character: Moral Formation and Leadership in Our Time, edited by James Mumford and Ryan S. Olson.
“It is always darkest just before it’s totally black.”1 A clever quip, from the late Republican presidential nominee John McCain, that captures perfectly the mood of many in our terrifying moment. At both the global and the local levels, the clouds that look most ominous also seem to be converging. Globally, consider the aggressions of Russia and China, of Iran and North Korea, of Hamas and the Houthis. Think about the advent of new technologies of terrorism and war and surveillance. Nearer to home, consider the diverse local impacts of extreme heat, parched crops, and rising seas across the United States or the threat of AI disrupting people’s livelihoods or the fact that, in America, social trust appears to be collapsing as tribalism and misinformation surge.
But “totally black”? Do we really have a rendezvous with that destiny? Or might Dr. King be closer to the mark? “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.”2 As we lurch from crisis to crisis, where can we find light? Well, one source of light, I think, is highly principled and highly effective leaders who can make a difference in the world precisely because they think, work, and collaborate differently—leaders who can come together and dream up new solutions to seemingly intractable local, regional, national, and global problems. Cultivating this kind of leadership is essential for the long-term health of our society and, indeed, all open societies.
Yet while we might wish that such leaders spring up naturally like desert wildflowers, the truth is we need resource-rich environments to nurture people capable of galvanizing others. We desperately need moral ecologies, whether they be formal or informal. We need healthy habitats. Such ecosystems provide the resources that bring out the best in leaders across their lives of evolving service—i.e., exciting ideas, foundational values, continuous learning, appropriate incentives, dynamic partnerships, and banks of social capital. In such habitats, leaders can be mentored and challenged. And they can find what is a rare thing—a site to (only) connect with other leaders, across sectors, across identities, across interests. These ecosystems are self-renewing and adaptive, enabling fresh forms and yet unproven practices of leadership to be tried out and modeled. At their best, moral ecologies celebrate honesty, integrity, service, and sacrifice as vital leadership virtues not for one time but for all time.
Now, crucially, ecologies of leaders cannot be cultivated by special interests or the state. No, it’s essential they be citizen-led and fed, both pluralistic and dynamic. They must incorporate government and business but cannot be vertically managed by them. But if they’re not to be stimulated by the state or catalyzed by commerce, where should we turn? America’s historic answer has been the multifarious institutions that make up civil society—our schools and faith communities, our philanthropic trusts and nonprofits, our charities, mutual aid fellowships, and citizen groups. As loosely coordinated collectives, these institutions encourage innovation and forge a democratic spirit. These distinctive and sometimes interconnected communities provide the indispensable elements of a more encompassing leadership ecosystem. Of course, myriad models of leadership prevail among our countless civil society organizations. But this is not a weakness. It’s a strength. Our country needs many types of leaders—differently equipped, from diverse backgrounds and sectors—who all give their everything to change the world yet do so in importantly diverse ways.
One case study highlighting the potential of civil society institutions to cultivate leaders is the institute I lead. The Aspen Institute is a global nonprofit comprising more than sixty programs, 600 employees, and some 75,000 participants in many countries. Our purpose is to “ignite human potential to build understanding and promote new possibilities for a better world,”3 and one major way we do that is by cultivating leaders. Our original agenda (the story of why we came to care about what we do), the ways we’ve expanded our reach since our founding seventy-five years ago, and our future priorities—all three demonstrate the unique and extraordinary power of civil society institutions to help form transformative leaders, men and women of character and influence, people who, to be frank, give a damn.
When you look back, it’s often during times of greatest threat—times like now—when what Edmund Burke hailed as the “little platoons”4 are willing and able to release new leaders and risk new approaches. The Aspen Institute was founded in the turbulent aftermath of World War II, the Holocaust, and Hiroshima. During our formative first years, the Soviet Union annexed Eastern Europe, the Cold War and the nuclear arms race commenced, and the Communist Party seized China. Meanwhile, in America, addressing the historic scandal of racial injustice finally became an urgent national priority.
Our midcentury founder, the Chicago industrialist Walter Paepcke, believed that to rise to these occasions, the West urgently needed “humanistic leaders who valued reason, knowledge, dialogue, culture, and moral inquiry.” A man of action, but one inspired by the University of Chicago’s Great Books program, Paepcke set out to organize, for three weeks in the summer of 1949, a global summit for 3,000 people in the remote mountain town of Aspen, Colorado. The agenda was to explore how humanism might be defined and applied to leadership and problem-solving, thus mitigating what Paepcke saw as an enervating cultural pessimism in the post-war, late modern West.5
Having attracted attention—or at least a Time magazine cover story—then, in December 1949, after an impassioned debate, Paepcke and his founding trustees established an institute “dedicated to the greatness of the human spirit and the worlds of man.” Its purpose was to affirm human dignity by allowing adults to contemplate “the creation of beauty and the attainment of truth,” which would provide “the elevation and liberation of a sound humanism.” Why was this needed? Because “in a world which almost worships science and technology,” the founders insisted, “we must rediscover the moral and spiritual truths which enable men to control science and all of its machinery.”6 And the key to all this? The key was leadership. Paepcke’s first move after the summer conference was to commission University of Chicago professor Mortimer Adler to curate a twelve-day leadership course.
Although this short course, our so-called “Executive Seminar,”7 has evolved over time, its central premises and organizing practices remain very much intact. Having immersed themselves in (excerpts from) canonical texts, from Plato’s Republic to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty to Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” participants are invited to reflect on their conceptions of the good life and the good society. The humanistic readings expose participants to a range of views on issues of fundamental concern—different “takes” on democracy, freedom, and community that challenge them to clarify their thinking, gauge other people’s perspectives, and hold in productive tension their own evolving (or even competing) ideas.8 Moderators aren’t there to force-feed some distinct ideology. Rather, their job is to spark and structure a conversation from which new insights might flow and new friendships form.
Thousands of leaders have taken the Executive Seminar since 1950. From the outset, sensing just how influential commerce would prove in post-war America, Paepcke and Adler were adamant that the invitation must be extended to business executives. The default assumption of the course? If you want to lead, you must understand both your own core principles as well as those that animate other people. As Paepcke wrote,
It is not the aim of the Aspen Executive Seminars to make a better treasurer out of a treasurer, or a better credit manager out of a credit manager. . . . The aim is to help American business leaders lift their sights above the possessions which possess them, to confront their own nature as human beings, to regain control over their own humanity by becoming more self-aware, more self-correcting, more self-fulfilling.9
Across two decades, the success of the Executive Seminar led the institute to start a second kind of course, this one focused on fiendishly difficult challenges in areas such as education, energy, national security, and the economy. Our thought was, basically, that leaders don’t just need the Executive Seminar to supply a grounding for values; they also needed practical knowledge in a rapidly changing world. Humanism meets social science.
Two approaches, then (one unapologetically values-based, the other more practical in focus), connect the why and how of leadership. It’s a combination that has given the Aspen Institute a balanced platform from which, as we’ve developed over the last five decades, we’ve expanded and deepened our offerings.
First, to extend and intensify the seminar experience, we have developed fellowships for cohorts of midcareer leaders. Some of these programs (serving twenty participants at a time for one or two years) enable leaders high on aspiration to identify their most basic beliefs and sense of purpose, in turn informing the furrows they intend to plough and the distinctive modus operandi they hope to adopt. Other fellowships, by contrast, are designed to help leaders in critically important public roles—community college presidents or state government officials seeking to break cycles of poverty—to build useful knowledge, skills, and networks and to explore solutions at the level of institutions, sectors, and systems. For example, one fellowship, Ascend, selects participants of varying political persuasions nevertheless united in their dedication to make the systems encountered by the very poorest (from the public health system to public education to job training programs) more responsive to whole families rather than merely lone users.
In both the values- and practice-based models (which can overlap), we recruit participants who typically hold divergent beliefs and hail from different walks of life. The basic idea is to afford opportunities for both personal growth and to provide the accountability that comes with lifelong fellowship. Steadfast commitment is non-negotiable; we think of these fellowships as a challenge for a leader rather than a credential or reward.
Second, over the last thirty years, our leadership development has become more international. Beginning with the founding of Aspen Institute-Germany in 1974, we’ve created a network of thirteen independently-run partner institutes in countries such as Colombia, India, Spain, Japan, and Ukraine—all of them facilitating Socratic-style conversations, reflections on values, and problem-solving. Concurrently, we offer practice-based fellowships that equip grassroots healthcare or small business entrepreneurs across the developing world. The working hypothesis of our global approach? Well, world cultures no longer exist in isolation from one another. Nor are nations always stuck behind impermeable borders. On the contrary, leaders around the world already encounter each other, both in cooperation and in competition in economic and diplomatic spheres.
Third, having in recent years developed a broader appreciation for who leads and how leadership is done, we’ve expanded the kind of support we offer. In addition to working with leaders of national institutions, we’re now also engaging grassroots leaders. “For the growing good of the world,” George Eliot writes at the end of her great novel Middlemarch, “is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.”10 To Eliot’s mind, I think, “unhistoric acts” are essentially feats of trust-building and problem-solving “pulled off” in local contexts that don’t go viral. Acknowledging that reality, as well as spurring on the police chiefs, clergy, foundation leaders, and job creators, is why we now host a national fellowship for local leaders.
One way we’re doing that is through our social fabric project. “Weave” was founded by the well-known author David Brooks who, a year before the pandemic, traversed the country to identify on-the-ground problem-solvers who were respected, even revered, in their communities. The antidote to tribalism and cynicism, Brooks was led to conclude, is to be found in the instructive examples of all manner of Americans willing to open their homes to children after school, to aid people with disabilities in their search for work, or to run errands for seniors. It is these dynamic, other-centered men and women who broker the trust and build the relationships that render communities resilient. Since that time, Aspen has convened hundreds of so-called “weavers” and then supported them through local meetings, skills workshops, and microgrants.
One new step we’ve taken in recent years has been to engage and include young people. Our Aspen Challenge program annually trains forty teams of high schoolers to identify and address common problems like mental health, school absenteeism, and drug use. Other programs zero in on specific subjects—e.g., art and poetry—or, like our Center for Native American Youth (CNAY), on a particular demographic. Our approaches vary. But underlying them all is our desire to help young people become more active citizens, more aware of their own strengths and potential, both informed about the distinctive threats they face and confident enough to volunteer their own solutions. Speaking of how our program helped him overcome a paralyzing cynicism about the state of the world, one Native American young man said: “I used to think that not voting was an act of rebellion. Because of my experience in CNAY, I know that it’s an act of surrender.”
In sum, perhaps the biggest lesson from the Aspen Institute’s history of innovation and expansion in leadership development is that it’s possible for a civil society institution to stay relevant without losing authenticity. You don’t have to cast off your core values or ditch your distinctive ways of working to respond well to the demands of a new cultural moment. Our enduring approach has always been to help foster and fuse genuinely civil dialogue, civic engagement, and values- and practice-based leadership development. That is why, in 2023, we committed ourselves to two priorities for the institute’s future service and development. Our first commitment is to bring together the roughly 75,000 Aspen-influenced leaders—the optimistic, aspirational, and resourceful women and men who’ve engaged with our programs at some point. The vision is to convert what is currently a set of tacit leadership networks tied to individual programs into an explicit enterprise-spanning trust-based global community. We want to see what might happen if we draw upon everything we have to forge vital, enduring connections between leaders of many types who we can already vouch for as extraordinary.
Secondly, inspired by the talent of young people, we will open our doors and programs more widely to youth, young adults, and young professionals and creators. In August 2024, we received an investment of $185 million from the Bezos Family Foundation to launch an endowed Center for Rising Generations at the Aspen Institute. The eminent educator Kaya Henderson, who led the Washington, DC, public schools with distinction, is our founding leader. Our vision is, working with others, to help make civil dialogue, civic engagement, and leadership development a predictable part of growing up in America and elsewhere. And in service of this vision, we believe we can apply and adapt our traditional approaches to leadership.
Like any other civil society institution, the perils we face are familiar: thinking far too highly of ourselves, mission drift, insisting that we only work on our own. Above all, we’ve found that it’s imperative to avoid any entanglement in political factionalism. Non-partisanship is, in my view, the sine qua non of cultivating an ecosystem that is made for all and made to last. And maybe the best way of not being derailed by partisanship is to rivet ourselves to our enduring purpose and methods, and the wisdom of our founders, as the basis for innovation and fresh priorities. When it comes to supporting leaders and leadership in a changing world, it’s worth the effort to try to become even more relevant by holding fast to what we are and how we work.
The rest of the essays are available in The Necessity of Character, available from Amazon.
