This week I had the opportunity to be in one of those experiences that shake you from within. I went to see the Pope. This gift came through the President of the Círculo Ecuestre, Enrique Lacalle, someone for whom that kind of access exists naturally because he has built a life in which barriers, simply, are not part of the vocabulary. While I was there, I thought that apart from the moment itself, which was extraordinary, there was also a profound lesson: a way of understanding ambition that makes everything possible.
There are people, and there are organizations, that operate without feeling that there are ceilings. Not because they have more resources, more talent, or more luck than others. But because at no point in their trajectory did they internally decide how far they could go. That invisible decision, that of setting a limit, is what separates those who transform their environment from those who only manage it.
Ambition has a bad reputation. For too long it has been confused with greed, with individualism, with trampling on the person next to you to get ahead faster. But that is an impoverished reading of something that, in its most genuine form, is one of the most powerful engines of progress. True ambition is not wanting more than others. It is refusing to accept that what exists today is the limit of what can exist tomorrow. It is the deep and sustained conviction that there is always one more conversation to have, one more door to open, a better version of the project that we have not yet imagined.
Open-horizon companies share this characteristic. They are not always the largest or most profitable at a given moment; they are the ones that at each stage of their history have asked themselves what else is possible. The ones that have reached a reasonable level of success and, instead of prudently managing it, have used it as a platform to take the next leap. There is something in that attitude that goes beyond strategy: it is a stance towards reality. A refusal to let the present dictate the terms of the future.
"In a scenario where the context is constantly redefined, misunderstood prudence is a danger"
I have seen this mindset in action in decision-making spaces where the question is not how to protect what has been achieved, but how to build what does not yet exist. And I have also seen the opposite: organizations with all the necessary assets to make a transformative leap that stood still because at some point someone decided that it was enough. That the risk was not worth it. That it was better to conserve than to explore. That decision, which always seems prudent when made, is usually the most expensive in the long run. In a scenario where the context is constantly redefined, misunderstood prudence is a danger. Conserving is no longer a strategy of resistance; it is, simply, delaying the moment of being out of the game.
What distinguishes leaders with this expansive mindset is not the absence of fear, it is that fear does not govern their agenda. They know the risk, they analyze it, they manage it. But they do not turn it into the ultimate criterion for their decisions. They have the ability to look beyond the discomfort of the moment and anchor their decisions in a vision of what can become. That ability, to clearly see something that does not yet exist and act accordingly, is, in my opinion, the most sophisticated form of leadership.
And it is also, curiously, the most contagious. These projects with a transformative vocation are not built by a single person, they are generated by a culture. An environment where ambition is collective, where every level of the organization understands that their job is not just to execute, but to imagine what else could be done. Where the standard is not set by the competitor but by the best possible version of oneself. That is not decreed from above: it is cultivated, modeled, spread by the example of those who lead.
That is the lesson I take from that morning with the Pope, and from the man who made it possible for me to be there. Access is not given by position or budget or the network of contacts accumulated over the years. It is given, first of all, by the conviction that such access is possible. The most difficult limits to overcome are not those imposed by the market, competition, or context. They are those we impose on ourselves, silently, without realizing it, at some point when we decide that it was enough.
The question that seems most relevant to any leader, to any company, is not where we are. It is what limit we have set for ourselves, and if we are willing to remove it.