Every year, Pivotal Leaders honors and connects the Northwest’s most innovative and talented cleantech executives. This peer-selected list of leaders helps our region build on its strong ethos of innovation around resources and sustainability, creating more jobs and new companies. Our end goal is to make this region an international leader in the rapidly growing cleantech economy.
Why Pivotal Leaders?
Our Process
Pivotal Leaders uses a proven two-step process to select its leaders. The process — community nomination and peer selection — is based on James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations (2004). Surowiecki’s thesis is that, with certain types of decisions, a diverse collection of people will make better choices than individuals or even experts would.
Community Nomination
Nomination requests are sent to nearly 4,000 individuals and institutions in the region. This request is then forwarded virally to anyone who might wish to submit a name for nomination.
Anyone can nominate up to 20 individuals who are senior level executives and decision makers building the cleantech economy in the Pacific Northwest.
- Nominees do not need to hold CEO or CTO titles
- Nominees do not need to have current involvement in a clean technology company
- Individuals should have ties to the Northwest, but are not required to be a Northwest resident
Additional Nomination Rules
- For a nomination to be valid, it must include name and email address of the nominee
- Anyone may submit a nomination
- Individuals may nominate themselves
- Once nominated the individual is automatically in the selection process (it doesn’t matter how many times he/she is nominated)
- No more than five people who work contemporaneously in the same organization at the time of voting may be nominated; in these cases, only the first five nominees will be included
Peer Selection
Once nominations are approved, the nominees are informed via email of their status. Nominees are given a unique URL to log on to the proprietary online selection tool and vote. He or she will be directed to a list of all nominees. Each nominee may then cast up to 10 votes within the total nomination pool. Those with the highest number of votes will be notified of their selection as a member of the Pivotal Leaders network for that year. They may opt out if they do not wish to be a member.
Additional Voting Rules
- Nominees may not submit new nominations at this point in the voting process
- Although nominees may vote for themselves, they may only vote for any individual once
- We reserve the right to include or exclude people from the list
Email addresses and other personal information used to communicate with nominees and individuals selected as Pivotal Leaders will not be sold or rented without approval.
