Alison Levine
Senior leaders are routinely asked to make consequential calls with incomplete information, fatigued teams, and conditions that change faster than the plan. The standard leadership playbook assumes stability that no longer exists. What organisations need is a way to keep teams cohesive and decisions sound when the environment refuses to cooperate.
Alison Levine is a polar explorer, New York Times bestselling author, and former West Point leadership faculty member who teaches senior leaders how to keep teams cohesive and decisions sound in conditions that refuse to cooperate.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Alison Levine
- A leadership curriculum tested in two unforgiving classrooms: the Department of Behavioural Sciences and Leadership at West Point, and the death zone above 8,000 metres on Everest.
- A bestseller, On the Edge, with a substantive thesis on decision-making under uncertainty, endorsed by Mike Krzyzewski and named 800-CEO-READ Best Business Book in the leadership category.
- A board seat at the Coach K Center on Leadership and Ethics at Duke, which gives her direct line of sight into how the most-studied executive teams in sport and business actually behave under stress.
- A track record across the Seven Summits, both Poles, and a 600-mile West Antarctic traverse, which lets her speak about cohesion and risk from inside the conditions, not as commentary on them.
Biography highlights
- Team captain, first American Women’s Everest Expedition.
- Completed the Adventure Grand Slam: Seven Summits plus skiing to both Poles. Fewer than forty people have done it.
- Adjunct professor for four years at the United States Military Academy at West Point, Department of Behavioural Sciences and Leadership.
- Board member and former Senior Fellow, Coach K Center on Leadership and Ethics, Duke University. MBA, Duke.
- New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of On the Edge: Leadership Lessons from Mount Everest and Other Extreme Environments, foreword by Mike Krzyzewski.
- Executive producer of Pasang: In the Shadow of Everest (2022), which screened at 45 festivals and won 20 awards.
Biography
The orthodox leadership playbook still assumes a degree of environmental stability that most senior leaders no longer recognise from their own week. Conditions change before plans land. Information is partial, teams are tired, and the cost of a wrong call rises while the time to make it shrinks. This is the territory Levine has spent twenty years in, first on expedition and later in a West Point classroom.
She served as team captain of the first American Women’s Everest Expedition, has summited the highest peak on each continent, skied to both Poles, and in 2008 completed a 600-mile traverse across West Antarctica hauling a 150-pound sled. She did all of this while managing Raynaud’s disease and the aftermath of three heart surgeries. The expeditions are not the message. They are the laboratory.
For four years she taught leadership at the United States Military Academy at West Point, in the Department of Behavioural Sciences and Leadership, before transitioning to the Thayer Leader Development Group. She sits on the board of the Coach K Center on Leadership and Ethics at Duke, where she earned her MBA, and was a Senior Fellow there. On the Edge, her bestseller, distils what holds and what fails when teams operate at the edge of capacity, and was named Best Business Book of the Year by 800-CEO-READ in the leadership category.
What buyers get is a serious operator with a serious classroom record, who can describe the precise mechanics of decision-making, team cohesion, and the strategic use of fear in conditions where being wrong is final. Pasang: In the Shadow of Everest, the documentary she executive-produced about Nepal’s first female Everest summiter, sits alongside the rest of the work as evidence that her interest in leadership extends beyond her own expeditions.
Key speaking topics
- Leadership under uncertainty
- Decision-making in extreme environments
- Team cohesion under pressure
- Risk, fear, and ego in senior leadership
- Resilience and recovery from setback
- Inclusive and values-based leadership
- Personal performance under physiological constraint
Ideal for
- Boards and executive committees navigating sustained volatility
- Senior leadership offsites for operating teams in regulated, safety-critical, or capital-intensive sectors
- Military, law enforcement, emergency services and first-responder leadership programmes
- CHROs and learning leaders building leadership development curricula
Audience outcomes
- A working model for making sound decisions when information is incomplete and conditions are deteriorating.
- A clearer view of how high-performing teams hold cohesion under fatigue, fear and disagreement.
- Specific tools for separating useful fear from career-limiting risk aversion.
- A reframe of setbacks and physical limitations as data, not as identity.
- Confidence that leadership lessons from the death zone translate into board-level decision practice, not metaphor.
Talks
A keynote on the leadership decisions that hold up when conditions are non-negotiable, drawn from Levine’s expedition record and her West Point classroom.
Key takeaways:
- How senior leaders make sound calls when information is partial and time is short.
- What separates teams that hold cohesion under stress from those that fragment.
- Why fear, used correctly, is a strategic asset rather than a liability.
A talk on converting perceived limitations, including physical and structural ones, into team and organisational strengths.
Key takeaways:
- A practical reframe of constraint as competitive information.
- How to build teams that recover faster than competitors after a shock.
- Why the leaders who admit limitation early outperform those who hide it.
A talk on community-led change, drawing on the trekking-guide training initiative Levine helped build with women in western Uganda.
Key takeaways:
- What cultural change looks like when it is led from inside, not imposed.
- How small operational interventions create durable economic shifts.
- Why investment in local leadership outperforms top-down development orthodoxy.