organizational-development
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Most Leadership Training Fails. Droste Group Bet Its Business on the Fix.
A woman-owned firm in the shadow of Detroit's auto plants built its business on a blunt premise: most leadership training doesn't stick. Here is how Droste Group tries to make it stick anyway.
ibelong
ibelong is a San Francisco-based consultancy that helps organizations build inclusive, resonant workplace cultures using a neurochemical framework grounded in affective neuroscience, relational neurobiology and epigenetics. Led by CEO and epigenetic coach Rajkumari Neogy, the company translates the brain science of trust and belonging into practical programs - immersive courses, leadership coaching, compassion circles and layoff (RIF) support - aimed at reducing conflict, burnout and turnover. Formerly known as iRestart, ibelong has worked with leaders at more than 175 startups and enterprises.
KRW International
KRW International is a global leadership consulting firm that treats character as a measurable business input, not a soft one. Built around the seven-year Return on Character research led by co-founder Fred Kiel, the firm uses proprietary assessments and predictive analytics to help CEOs, senior teams, and boards close the gap between who they intend to be and how they are actually experienced. Its pitch - coaching based on data, not opinion - reframes integrity, responsibility, forgiveness, and compassion as habits that correlate with returns, engagement, and reduced risk.
Kelly Kiel Garramone
Kelly Kiel Garramone is the CEO of KRW International and Executive Director of the KRW Research Institute, a Washington, DC-based consulting firm built on the evidence-based Return on Character methodology. With more than three decades of executive experience and assignments in six countries alongside her diplomat husband, she translates behavioral science research into coaching and certification programs used by boards, C-suites, and learning and development teams worldwide.
Balloon
Balloon is a behavioral-science-based collaboration platform that helps teams surface ideas, feedback and insights without groupthink. Through its 'Flights' feature, teams share and evaluate input anonymously and asynchronously, removing the cognitive biases, hierarchy and group dynamics that silence quieter voices in meetings. Founded by public-health researcher Amanda Greenberg and engineer Noah Bornstein, Balloon counts companies like Google, Amazon, Capital One and MasterClass among its users and reports cutting meeting time by roughly 70% while surfacing information that has never been heard inside an organization.
AceUp
AceUp is a Boston-based leadership development company that pairs human coaches with AI-powered people analytics to make executive and team coaching measurable and scalable. Through a network of thousands of ICF-certified coaches and a data platform it calls Ally, AceUp helps enterprises like IBM, L'Oreal and LVMH turn coaching - long treated as a perk for the C-suite - into a quantifiable driver of engagement, alignment and performance.
Rohini Mukand
Rohini Mukand is a Partner on the HR team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture capital firms. With a career spanning HR leadership at some of tech and retail's biggest names - Amazon (AWS and Alexa), eBay/PayPal, Ross Stores, and Delivery Agent - she now helps shape the people strategy behind a firm managing over $39 billion in assets. Educated at Swarthmore College in Sociology and Anthropology, she brings a humanist lens to the high-stakes world of building technology organizations.