Image of the San Juan mountains at Wolf Creek, Colorado during winter snowfall in December 2025, taken at nearly 12,000 feet above sea level (photo courtesy of the Author).
I don’t think I’m the first person to establish a connection between the act of research and producing scholarship as a form of leadership. Any contribution to a field, regardless of scope or the scale of its impact, requires a certain kind of commitment to new ideas that echoes core tenets of leadership. But I want to be a bit more precise about how we should examine research as a practical application of leadership and the ways that different philosophies of leadership through scholarship can apply elsewhere. To do so, I think it’s critically to establish the concrete relationship between leadership—as a general philosophy and practice—and research the way we might envision it within the university.
Before I do that, I want to draw on an important framework of leadership that I came across over winter break while reading Brené Brown’s newest book, Strong Ground. The book spans several complex topics, from understanding transformative change to grappling with the inherent uncertainties of things like artificial intelligence and political turmoil. Yet the notion of leadership as risk-taking stood out to me, and an apt quote in one of her talks at 99U sums that idea up quite nicely. It’s drawn from a talk by Theodore Roosevelt at the Sorbonne, and goes as follows (excerpted slightly for brevity):
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly;… who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”
Brown focuses deeply on this idea of “daring greatly,” and I think it’s an important visual idea to imagine: the people in the arena taking risks, showing up with their full selves, and acknowledging that failure comes with the necessary act of daring towards ambitious, lofty ideas. That, to me, is a critical way of conceptualizing how research and leadership work together. To some, the critic may count to a degree: feedback and our shortcoming are the avenues we are given to learn and improve as students, scholars, and thinkers. But the act of daring greatly in our work, tilting towards lofty end goals and doing so with authenticity and vulnerability is what constitutes strong leadership. And the idea that research can be a way of doing this makes sense.
Research, by nature, is supposed to push new ideas to the frontier. It aims, regardless of the subject matter or discipline, to test new concepts, methods, and frameworks to help reveal new insights about the scientific, literary, historical, social, (etc.) world around us. But I think the idea of “daring greatly” goes a bit further. Research as leadership understands the act of scholarship as an innovative process, and in doing so, asks us to bring something of ourselves—our curiosity, conviction, willingness to be wrong—into the work. It is not enough to simply replicate what has been done or to follow a well-worn methodological path because it feels safe. Daring greatly in research means proposing a question that hasn’t been asked, pursuing a framework that hasn’t been tested, or even entering a field site without a guaranteed outcome. It means treating uncertainty as the very condition that makes discovery, research, and leadership possible, rather than as a liability or danger. And when we lead through that process and when we share our findings, invite critique, and stand behind work that is genuinely ours, we model a form of leadership that is rooted equally in authority and intellectual courage born from courageous risk-taking. That is “daring greatly.”
This is why I think it’s worth renewing what we mean by ambition in research. Too often, I think, ambition in academic settings gets reduced to metrics: the prestige of a journal, the scope of the dataset, the legibility—or applicability—of the outcome. But ambition in the sense that Brown describes, and in the sense that matters for research as leadership, is something closer to failure-fearlessness. It is the willingness to pursue an idea or line of inquiry knowing that it may not resolve neatly and that the results may complicate—rather than confirm—existing ideas. It’s knowledge that the process itself might expose gaps in our understanding. That kind of ambition is harder to quantity but is far more transformative. It embraces a culture of breaking things—old conventions and ways of producing knowledge—while refusing to shy away from the failure that can bring. When we stop treating that failure as something to be avoided and start treating it as evidence that we are working at the edge of what we know, we free ourselves to do research that leads, open doors for others, reframes the conversation, and refuses to settle.
The students and scholars who dare greatly are not the ones who never stumble. They are the ones who pursue questions worthy of the risk, persistence, stumbling, and failure-fearlessness that lead to new, powerful ideas.
Ishaan Barrett, CC’26