The Research Behind the
Work

Two decades in executive search +
a decade of global data

For twenty years, Laura's job was to read talent and ambition for a living. When she sold her executive search firm, she set out to understand what she'd been seeing — and turned it into research. Nearly 10,000 people across 113 countries, a grounded-theory study of intuition, and the four C's of consonance now sit beneath four bodies of work. Start wherever your question lives.

You lived it

You lead it

Once you've understood it and lived it, you can't unsee it. And it changes how you lead.

Spot

We've learned to spot performance, when we should be spotting the patterns in ourselves that predict potential. As a result, we keep looking for what we've seen before, which leaves us only where we've been before.

Greatness

Stoke

Once you know the nine success-predictive behaviors to spot, you can cultivate and amplify them — in yourself, and in others, so you can know who to invest in, and how to help them thrive.

Strive

We're taught to strive, and to measure how we're doing by status, money, title — the boxes everyone agrees are worth ticking. But the boxes that predict who thrives give us consonance: the combination of calling, connection, contribution, and control that puts us in alignment with our purpose.

Limitless

Steward

You understand now that people don't stay for the old corporate scorecards of dependence and need. They stay for the same four boxes you went looking for yourself — the ones that give them alignment, belonging, and purpose.

Succeed

We are told success is a finish line, but it is only a tease of what we're capable of next. Instead of arrival, we find doubt, pressure, and the quiet question of what now.

Wonderhell

Sustain

As your team achieves more, they find themselves in uncharted territory. That's when the doubt, uncertainty, and impostor syndrome arrive. You've been there yourself. It's time to sustain their performance through it, instead of losing them to the stress and burnout from it.

~10,000

survey responses across 113 countries

100+

in-depth executive interviews

3M+

of views on her TEDx talk

20 yrs

leading executive search

As seen in

Good Morning America TODAY Harvard Business Review Forbes

The Keynotes

This research doesn't stay on the page.

Every body of work is also a keynote — built for wherever your people are in the story, from spotting potential to stoking it. Customizable, available in-person and virtually.

Book Laura → See the keynotes →

About

Meet Laura Gassner Otting

Laura Gassner Otting is a Wall Street Journal and Washington Post bestselling author, researcher, and keynote speaker who helps individuals, leaders, and organizations become limitless. A former White House appointee who helped build AmeriCorps, she spent two decades leading executive searches before turning to the research behind engagement, ambition, and potential.

Her TEDx talk has been viewed millions of times, and her work has been featured by Good Morning America, the TODAY show, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and more.

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Laura Gassner Otting