— About Aspen Leadership Seminars
Our History
How the Aspen Executive Seminar has expanded over 75-years as the flagship program of the Aspen Institute.
Leadership Seminars at the Aspen Institute
For many years, the Aspen Institute was the Aspen Executive Seminar. Founded in 1950 as “The Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies”, the Institute sought to bring leaders from diverse sectors and walks of life to engage in the fundamentals of moral reasoning:
What does it mean to be human in a technological age?
What does it mean to be a good citizen in a democratic society?
What are the principles which allow for individual freedom and economic progress as well as justice, fairness, and the life of the spirit?
The Aspen Executive Seminar was—and is—the perfect context in which to engage these fundamental questions as human being and citizen.
The vision of the Institute’s Founders—Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke, Robert Hutchins, and Mortimer Adler—was informed by the conviction that the decisions we make are ultimately not technical but moral. Because our challenges are human challenges, that original vision prized the centrality of moral reasoning as something that could not be taught, though it could be learned. That is, the Executive Seminar from the beginning was understood as an opportunity to exercise our intellectual and moral muscles—to be confronted with new or unfamiliar ideas, to refine our own system of values, and to become more adept at navigating the moral infrastructure that allows us to live justly in a free society.
As the Institute’s Founders contemplated two World Wars and the Great Depression, they understood that democracy and free markets rested on fragile foundations. Understanding these foundations, they held, was essential for anyone doing business, or engaged in civic activity, or participating in the agencies of government.
Two wars and a great recession later, the human problems persist, as does the need to get at our most serious perplexities. Since 1950, the Executive Seminar has provided the foundation of our leadership and values seminars, all of which employ what we have come to call “the Aspen Method” of moderated, text-based dialogue.
A method which—through frank, moderated, thoughtful conversation—uncovering core values helping us frame problems and find solutions in an age of increasingly rapid change and moral and technical complexity.
“I should like to try an experiment and I would like your help in it. The background is this: Many business leaders have come increasingly to recognize that the most plaguing and persistent problems of business are not the technical problems—engineering, selling, accounting, and the rest. They are what Clarence Randall calls “human problems”; not merely industrial relations, but the whole galaxy of perplexities of man to man, man to society, and man and society to government. Scarcely one of our decisions, major or minor is not premised upon some aspect of these problems and our view of it.
Yet we don’t do much about it. We send our brighter men to special professional and technical meetings and sometimes to special schools or courses. And in the case of Container at least, I think we get something from it. But these things, valuable as they are, don’t get at our most serious perplexities.”
— Walter Paepcke, Chairman of the Container Corporation of America, advertising the first Aspen Executive Seminar
What We Offer Today
Aspen Leadership Seminars offer residential leadership development seminars in Aspen, CO for individuals as well as bespoke custom leadership seminars for organizations.
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From Aspen, CO to around the world, our seminars convene leaders across sectors and experiences. Whether you’re exploring an opportunity for yourself or your organization, we’d love to hear from you.
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