Our Expertise

Corporate Development Group is the world's leading authority on the measured alignment of strategy, culture and leadership. We have taken organizational development to a new level by making the connection between marketplace, customer promise, leadership, culture, and individual performance.

By doing this, we maximize the collective capacity of our client's people to create value.

There are three leverageable resources: money, information, and people. By "leverageable" we mean that if you invest in these resources and manage them well, you will get a return on that investment. Business leaders have made great strides when it comes to money and information. They have had a harder time of it regarding people. Our breakthrough process technology solves that problem. Our approach gives leaders a practical roadmap for harnessing their people resources and unleashing their productivity.

Our approach measurably links four customer promises with four organizational cultures and four leadership practices. It shows why each market, promise, culture and leadership practice needs to be internally consistent and how leaders can ensure that consistency. It shows that many good leadership and management ideas fail because they are misapplied. One size does not fit all. It shows which ideas and practices fit which market, customer promise, and organizational culture. By doing so, it builds on the strengths of the organization, gets to root causes of wasted people energy, and provides a practical roadmap for accelerating business growth.

Consider these four organizations: a nonprofit charity organization, a nuclear power plant, a public relations firm, and a research and development firm. The markets for these organizations are drastically different. Their promises to their customers are drastically different. Their organizational cultures are drastically different. Common sense would suggest that these four organizations, different in every respect, should be led differently as well. Yet, almost every approach to the practice of leadership posits a one-size-fits-all approach for every organization. When the leaders of the four above-mentioned organizations peruse the leadership books section of their local bookstore they will encounter stacks and stacks of books, each one purporting to have the one-best-way to practice leadership.

Our approach starts by identifying our client's core market and core promise. Unlike every other leadership approach, we take the position that one's market and customer promise set the stage for everything that follows. We, then, provide our client with a practical, measurable roadmap for building an organizational culture and set of leadership practices that are uniquely designed to deliver consistently on that customer promise.

We partner with our clients and work to transfer our expertise to our client's internal resources who can take over and continue on with needed developmental interventions.

In the Fall of 2007, our framework for aligning strategy, culture and leadership was chosen by the Society of Consulting Psychology (American Psychological Association) as one of 73 systems of thought that have made the greatest contribution to consulting psychology in the last century!