Linda Yates is an experienced venture capital entrepreneur, accomplished chief executive officer, and award-winning author based in Portola Valley, California, who has spent more than three decades developing global strategy and managing growth and innovation at Silicon Valley and Global 1000 companies. She is the author of “The Unicorn Within: How Companies Can Create Game-Changing Ventures at Startup Speed,” a global best seller published through Harvard Business Review Press and named a Forbes Top 10 Business Book. As a Henry Crown Fellow with the Aspen Institute, Yates took part in a program that pairs seminars on leadership and society with a hands-on Leadership Venture, a project each Fellow designs to address a substantial societal challenge. Yates studied international relations and comparative politics at Stanford University and holds a foreign affairs degree from the University of Virginia, and she remains an active philanthropist and education advocate.
At the Aspen Institute’s Henry Crown Fellowship, accomplished entrepreneurial leaders spend two years examining leadership and putting ideas into practice. Alongside four seminars, every Fellow undertakes a Leadership Venture, a project they design to address a substantial societal challenge. The Venture is intended to produce meaningful benefits, not merely serve as an exercise in planning.
The projects differ widely. Fellows may start an organization or program, improve or expand a service already running, develop a new product, or test a different way to organize an existing system. This range allows a Venture to grow out of practical work as well as an original idea.
What unites these approaches is a purpose beyond the Fellow’s ordinary professional goals. Ventures should express personal values, offer a fresh response to a social challenge, and push the person undertaking them to do something demanding. That challenge might involve access to education, basic services, or opportunities in a local community.
An initiative also need not be housed in a nonprofit. Ventures can operate within businesses, nonprofit organizations, or government, depending on the work they aim to carry out. One Fellow might strengthen an existing program, while another creates a new service using an organization’s established resources.
Fellows do not have to arrive with every feature of a project settled. They are expected to turn an early idea into a more definite undertaking and actively pursue it during the two-year program. That leaves room for the project’s design to develop while retaining a requirement to carry out meaningful work.
One documented Henry Crown Leadership Venture established a scholarship-focused nonprofit in Chicago to help students and their parents or guardians pursue education after high school. The initiative offers financial assistance alongside academic advising, career exploration, and mentoring. Combining financial assistance with practical support addresses more than tuition costs, although the goal of avoiding education debt is not a guaranteed outcome for every participant.
Another Henry Crown Leadership Venture used an established eyewear company’s products and partnerships. Working with New York City’s Community School Initiative, the company launched a program to provide glasses to students who needed them. A similar program later reached Baltimore public schools, showing how a Venture can draw on an existing business and public partners rather than building a new organization.
Venture work unfolds alongside the Fellowship’s seminars. In discussions about leadership, values, and society, Fellows also present their projects and consider the challenges of putting plans into practice. The seminars address subjects such as the meaning of a good society, global leadership challenges, and the legacy leaders leave behind.
Later seminars give Fellows time to discuss progress, share lessons from their work, and explore how that experience relates to their responsibilities as leaders. The program follows projects between those discussions. Each Fellow participates in four mandatory Venture check-ins and provides written and verbal updates on progress.
When someone encounters difficulties, the Fellowship can offer support, although undertaking the work does not mean that every project’s full ambitions will be achieved within two years. Longer-term work is part of the intention from the start. Leadership Ventures are designed so their activities can continue after the formal Fellowship ends, whether through an operating program, an expanded service, or further efforts toward the original goal.
Continuing an initiative may require ongoing resources and partnerships, and the possibility of lasting impact does not guarantee that every project will succeed.
About Linda Yates
Linda Yates is a venture capital entrepreneur, chief executive officer, and author based in Portola Valley, California, with more than three decades of experience guiding growth and innovation at Silicon Valley and Global 1000 organizations. She founded Mach49 and previously served as CEO of Strategos and head of the San Francisco office of the Mac Group/Gemini Consulting. A Henry Crown Fellow with the Aspen Institute, she wrote “The Unicorn Within” and holds degrees from Stanford University and the University of Virginia.
