Acknowledgments

The CEOs we spoke to repeatedly stressed the collective nature of higher-ambition leadership. This was certainly true of the creation of this book: the research and writing was a collective effort that extends well beyond the five authors.

First, without the investment of time by the CEOs we interviewed and their open sharing of their hard-won insights and wisdom, this book would not have been possible. While some of the CEOs and their stories feature more prominently in the text, the findings are based on a thorough analysis and weighting of the perspectives of all the CEOs in the study. We appreciate the generosity of spirit with which the CEOs engaged with us throughout the project.

A number of our colleagues helped us conduct interviews with higher-ambition leaders, including Kathy MacDonald, Chris Richmond, Derek Schrader, and Dick Shafer. Malcolm Wolf and Ravi Venkatesan took the lead on our four interviews with Indian CEOs. Thomas Rice partnered with Mike Beer to conduct a round of follow-up interviews with a few of our CEOs that focused on their development as leaders. These interviews and Thomas’s insights greatly enriched the themes and content of chapter 8, “Becoming a Higher-Ambition Leader.”

The quality of this manuscript has also benefited greatly from the comments and reflections of our editor at the Harvard Business Review Press, Melinda Merino, and of other close colleagues, including Niclas Adler, Jim Bennett, Maria Elmquist, Magnus Finnström, Björn Frössevi, Jay Galbraith, Ola Jönsson, Kathrin Möslein, Hannes Norrrgren, Marcus Norrgren, Sean Quigley, Shankar Raman, Chris Richmond, Dick Shafer, and Ravi Venkatesan. They repeatedly challenged us to sharpen our thinking and clarify our language, reminding us that the topic was just too important to not get right. Special thanks are owed to one of our higher-ambition leaders, Peter Dunn, for his thorough review and insightful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. Likewise, Peter Lundin, a higher-ambition leader not included in the sample, provided valuable feedback on early drafts.

This book would not have come to life without the patience and extraordinary craft of our collaborating writer, John Butman, and his colleagues, Hannah Alpert-Abrams and Anna Weiss. We are grateful to them for successfully taking on the quixotic task of working with five very opinionated coauthors and helping us to create an integrated manuscript that represents the best of all of us. We are also deeply appreciative of the extensive support we received from our colleagues at TruePoint. The patience, good humor, and enthusiasm they have shown over the four years it has taken for this work to come to fruition are only exceeded by that shown by our families.

The Division of Research at Harvard Business School provided funding for our analysis to select the sample, for transcription, and for three conferences in the United States at which we shared preliminary findings from this research with over thirty higher-ambition leaders and benefited from their perspectives. Chalmers University provided equivalent support for a similar conference held in Sweden. At Chalmers, Dean Per Svensson and Research Division head Mats Lundqvist have provided Flemming and Tobias time, financial support, leeway in their academic duties, and collegial understanding for this very time-consuming project. In the Division for the Management of Organizational Renewal and Entrepreneurship, our close colleague Susanne Ollila has been a continuous source of encouragement throughout this period. Christopher Hedvall needs a warm and special thanks for his great work managing some of the extensive data that we collected, as does Clara Strömbeck for her quick, accurate help at the end of this writing period. Tobias is very grateful to the Tom Hedelius and Jan Wallander Foundation for a research stipend that made the first year of this research possible, and for a travel grant that funded a period as guest researcher at Harvard Business School to focus on the writing of this book. We are grateful to Karin Nilsson and Jan Simmons for the unfailing grace and competence with which they supported the complex administrative requirements of this project—from arranging the logistics of interviews, to transcribing interviews, to ensuring that the four conferences we conducted came off without a hitch.

Finally, we have listed the names of the coauthors alphabetically on the title page because this book was the result of a team effort with five equally contributing members. The coauthors and John Butman spent many days discussing and analyzing the meaning of our interviews. Out of these discussions, the key themes in this book emerged. We each then took responsibility for writing up the first drafts of the individual chapters and then worked together to sharpen the content and weave together key themes. We chose to highlight two members of the author team, Mike Beer and Flemming Norrgren, on the front cover of this book because they will be playing a leading role in taking this work forward in their respective roles as the chairman of the TruePoint Center and director of the TruePoint Center Europe.