Daniella Ballou-Aares helps business leaders use their influence to move democracy forward.
Why you should listen
Daniella Ballou-Aares is a seasoned executive who galvanizes business leaders to use their collective influence to renew and safeguard American democracy. For more than 20 years, she's worked as an executive, senior public official and advisor to CEOs and political leaders. She started the Leadership Now Project in 2017 to focus business leaders on the critical actions required to renew democracy in the US. Leadership Now drives change by pairing sophisticated analysis from top thinkers with capital and action by its members.Ballou-Aares began her career at Bain & Company. From there, she became a founding partner at Dalberg, where she led the Americas business and spent a decade growing it from a startup to a leading global group of social impact businesses with 25 offices across Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe and the US. She served for five years as the Senior Advisor for Development to the US Secretary of State, working under Secretaries Clinton and Kerry. She was instrumental in negotiating the 192-country agreement on the Sustainable Development Goals and reorienting the 10-billion-dollar US government global HIV program toward data-driven programming.
Ballou-Aares' perspectives have been featured in the Harvard Business Review, Fortune, The New York Times, Fast Company, POLITICO and the World Economic Forum, among others. She's a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was a 2014 World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. She holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, an MPA from the Kennedy School and graduated cum laude from Cornell with a BS in operations research and industrial engineering.
