About Ember & Oak
Building Capability That Lasts
Ember & Oak explores how leaders build the capabilities, systems, and conditions that help people, teams, and organizations perform, adapt, and thrive.
About Ember & Oak
Leadership Should Leave the Organization Stronger
Ember & Oak Leadership was created around a simple idea: leadership should build capability.
Strong leaders do more than solve today's problems. They create clarity, develop judgment, strengthen trust, improve how decisions are made, and help organizations learn from experience.
Ember & Oak explores those responsibilities through research-informed perspectives, practical frameworks, and interactive experiences designed to examine the thinking behind leadership decisions.
The work spans executive leadership, organizational capability, feedback, decision-making, AI-enabled organizations, and leadership development.
Our Mission
Helping leaders and organizations build the capabilities that enable people, teams, and institutions to thrive.
We focus on the leadership decisions, systems, conversations, and operating practices that strengthen organizational capability over time.
The Founders
Two Perspectives on Leadership and Organizational Capability
Ember & Oak brings together experience in executive leadership, organizational strategy, education, operational performance, advocacy, and the human experience of institutions.
Co-Founder
Clayton E. Thompson
Ph.D., Organizational Leadership
Clayton brings more than two decades of leadership experience across complex operations, organizational transformation, executive governance, strategy, and leadership education. His work focuses on how leaders build judgment, strengthen organizational systems, develop people, and create the conditions for sustained performance.
Co-Founder
Erica Thompson
Leadership, Advocacy & Organizational Perspective
Erica brings experience in business leadership, operational turnaround, national advocacy, and more than two decades navigating the realities of military family life. Her perspective emphasizes how organizational decisions, policies, and leadership practices are experienced by the people operating within the system.
The Ember & Oak Perspective
Leadership Should Leave Something Stronger Behind
The measure of leadership extends beyond the decisions made today. It is also reflected in the judgment, trust, systems, and capability that remain when the leader is no longer in the room.