To date we have 579 research subjects, scored on clearly identified and observed evidence and outcomes.

Hi, I'm Russell Raath. I want to share with you a little bit about what we've been doing around the world of ambition, the science, the research that we've done, and everything that we do every day with teams and leaders around the world. I've been in this domain for around 30 years, working with teams to elevate performance. I've worked for a big consulting firm, I've worked in corporate, and I've worked alongside one of the thought leaders, the most preeminent thought leaders, around change and transformation.

I've identified something, though, that has been very rarely examined, and it's this idea of ambition. Ambition as a driver of direction, a differentiator, the pull, the momentum, both for leaders, for teams, for individuals, across the spectrum. And what we sought to explore was the idea of what ambition is, the good side, the dark side, the successes and the failures, and all of that has built up into this corpus of knowledge that we have, this whole series, "The Science of Ambition." Essentially, looking at what is it that ambition can do, how we can take this and use it for good to deliver both for teams and for individuals outcomes that are better. And the core idea is that ambition is what takes what can be, what might be, and turns it into what must be.

It's much more than a vision. A vision is simply that. It's what someone might see. But there's nothing about a vision that makes me want to do it, and that's what ambition does.

So it takes this idea, and in the face of adversity and the face of failure, and we look at what is true about this, what's true for an individual person, but then how do we scale that into a 500 or a 5,000-person company, or even larger? And we distill that into the research. Now, there's two kinds, right? There's ambition as an individual.

If we think about people who come to mind, I'm sure there's any number of people, both famous and maybe famous to you, who've had a big impact. And then we look at teams and companies, bets they've made, projects that have been spectacular, either a success or perhaps even a failure. And we've scored these across a rubric that we've evolved over 600 now, 600 different cases. But the rubric has remained relatively constant, and we will only score if we have a named fact.

No sort of hypothesis around how popular they are or just sensational stories, but it's got to be disciplined, and we've scored them based on evidence. Now, if we look at the individual model, we've looked at people that we've scored across their whole life, and we've looked at this across three different dimensions. The first is conviction, and this is what they held internally, the fire behind the work, the calling that then followed and how certain they were around making this happen, which led to their resourcefulness. That's all conviction.

The second piece is all around audacity, and this is around what they attempted, the size and the shape of the thing that they undertook, how unconventional it might have been, how distinctive it was, and what sort of impact did it have? And it didn't have to necessarily be global, but those are often the ones that we think about, sort of global or large scale. And the third dimension then is all about energy, and this is around what they actually activated in the world and in others while they were doing it. Did they create a captivating and compelling story?

Did they and others take action as a result of that story, and did it build the momentum that propelled them forward, or did it just sort of die on the vine? These three dimensions, each one has a number of different drivers, and we score them on this hard evidence, this one through nine rating that we've given them. The part that's interesting here, though, is that those numbers don't just add up. You see, what we didn't want is somebody who was strong in two dimensions but weak in a third to still score highly, because obviously the weakness is a core part of their story, but it's also a core detractor in how ambitious they were.

So one genuinely weak driver or one genuinely weak dimension will drag the whole score down. So a brilliant idea, no matter how great it is, with no follow-through, can't score like a brilliant idea. It scores like it actually was. When we look at the cases, so those were individuals, we then look at the cases.

These are companies or products, ventures, bets that they took, initiatives, anything that a team builds together, not one person alone. Then we have the same dimensions. We have conviction, we have audacity, but in the case of these subjects, these cases, we've changed the third dimension from energy, which is very individual and personal. You can see that, you can feel that.

And in a company, we've started looking at that in terms of velocity. Now, if we take the first couple of things, we took it a team. The team isn't measured just by what they do once. We've got to look at how they do this consistently.

All of our dimensions have pairs, so let's talk about what these are. Conviction, similar to what we had in the individual case, this is about sort of who represents that. The foundation is the team, so having the right team, the right conditions, doing their work honestly with candor, and then measuring whether those hard truths actually surface. That's a great team.

The sharpening move that comes with the team then is the pursuit that they have. It's the clarity and the certainty about their reason to exist. This goes to the intensity and how constant that one clear reason to exist is, and whether it gets held under pressure or not. It determines how resourceful they are.

That's really the expression of this conviction. The second dimension in the case example is all around audacity. And this is about how distinctly they're owning this position. The foundation here is what advantage they have.

What is distinctly different and hard for a competitor to displace, well beyond price? We'll look at how durable this is and how it's sharpened by the bets that they take, the calculated choices about what to do and what to stop doing to realize their advantage. This is going to measure their concentration, and it subtracts if they don't focus, for instance, and it amplifies if they follow through against that advantage. All of this leads to just how compelling the ambition is that they have.

The third dimension then is velocity. With individuals, we had energy. With cases, now we have velocity, and this is how far it travels and what that bar looks like. What we looked at in our research is the two components here is a bar that gets set about standards that they accept, the non-negotiable ways of working.

It's not process, and it's not progress. It just measures a bar of what they're willing to tolerate, how high that bar is. That bar is then sharpened by the action they take, how that amplifies across an organization. You can have high standards, but if no one adopts them, that really doesn't give you velocity.

This is all then multiplied by the breadth and how fast it works. So the biggest difference is that cases are not scored across the whole life cycle of a company. That would not be right. This is not many case studies on every company that ever existed.

This is about whether or not that one bet actually achieved what it sought to achieve. What happened after that, whether it was successful or not, is a different story about organizational performance and endurance that we didn't get into. We haven't graded the ending. We've graded where the ambition was.

So that's a little bit about what these scores are. We've absolutely held to evidence only, so you will see that. Two models, one discipline. It's built to be auditable, right?

Not just asserted. So every profile, every person, every company has been scored exactly the same way on the evidence that we collected. We're going to be going deep on the scoring for each profile. But we wanted you to have the perspective and the context of our whole model, because there really are profound lessons for leaders and teams if you're looking to elevate your ambition.