The Thesis
A number on integrity
Here is a question that sounds soft until you try to answer it with data: does a CEO's character show up on the balance sheet? Most people have an opinion. KRW International, a leadership consulting firm founded in 1991, did the annoying thing and ran the study - seven years of it, across Fortune 500 companies, privately held firms, and nonprofits. The finding, published as Return on Character by Harvard Business Review Press in 2015, is the kind of thing that makes a boardroom go quiet: executive teams rated high on character delivered nearly five times the returns of teams rated low, and ran organizations with 26% higher workforce engagement.
Now, you should be a little skeptical of any firm that sells the thing its own research validates, and KRW would probably respect you for it - their whole pitch is "coaching based on data, not opinion." The useful move here is that they turned a fuzzy word into four observable behaviors you can actually rate: integrity, responsibility, forgiveness, and compassion. You may notice that "forgiveness" is not a word that appears on most corporate dashboards. That is sort of the point. KRW's argument is that the market has been mispricing character because nobody bothered to measure it, and mispricings are where the interesting money is.
Who you are as a leader is more predictive of your impact than what you know how to do.
— KRW International, on the Return on Character thesis
The name is the founders: Kiel, Rimmer, and Williams. Fred Kiel, a psychologist, was the researcher and public face - his most-watched talk was titled, memorably, "Psychopaths in the C-Suite," which tells you he was not squeamish about the dark side of the finding. If good character compounds, bad character quietly does the opposite, and it takes a lot of shareholder value down with it before anyone writes it in a memo.
Kiel passed away in 2020. The firm he co-founded continues under CEO Kelly Garramone, who joined in 1991 as COO and now runs both KRW International and its affiliated research arm, the KRW Research Institute.
What KRW actually sells is the translation layer. A study is a study; a study you can run on your own board, attach a number to, and turn into one specific thing to change on Monday - that is a product. KRW built assessments, coaching programs, and a coach-certification pipeline around exactly that translation. The idea is not to make you a better person in the abstract. It is to find the single behavior - they call it your Keystone Habit - whose change moves the most downstream.
Whether you buy the causation or read it as correlation, the discipline is worth stealing: before advising anyone, ask what evidence you actually have. Usually the honest answer is less than you'd like.
